today marks the second decade i have spent in this particular collection of atoms on this ball of rock floating in a vacuum. cool beans, i’m not dead yet.
actually i think birthday parties make sense. survival should be celebrated (provided you sort of maybe kind of wanted to survive).
we named our house the treehouse because they have trained a tree to grow across the front porch effectively screening us from the street. i like being alone in the house better than i like being in the house with other people. i have been told that i am to spend at least a year living by myself. hm.
All I’ve done over the past two days is lay in bed reading and rereading my literary theory notes then alternately sleeping and panicking. Can this end now.
I saw Kathleen and actually managed to unclench my jaw. I also discovered that my therapist listens to Bright Eyes, which is awesome. Then I went back to my room and pulled the blinds and curled up with my face in a pillow and listened to some lectures on literary theory even though I knew I was going to fall asleep. Maybe the information could sink into my subconscious. Then my only saucepan disappeared from the common room so now I can’t cook and I don’t know if I’m really happy about that because well, I can’t cook, and if I can’t cook I can’t exactly eat, or devastated. I keep wanting to laugh which could indicate either emotion.
A-lexi-thymia. Without words for emotions. Perhaps I should change my name to Alexithymia. Go by Alexi or Thymia. Though Thymia would be ironic, because these days I feel nothing but panic or…nothing.
It will be cold this week. If I cut, I can wear long sleeves, and no one will know.
No one has to know.
sleep won’t have me and the waking world’s tired of me. the world is never on my string. i am playing tug of war and there is no way to win.
i am afraid to leave my room and i am afraid to stay inside. there is nothing to be afraid of (there are always things to be afraid of). amorphous anxiety, drifting, writhing in my chest. without an object. nameless dread.
appreciate my lunacy and let me sleep with half your body shielding me. your weight does not scare me like mine does. how solid your chest. what startling clarity, a landlocked lighthouse. neither one of us exists as we do to each other. perhaps to you i am not a hungry lie. perhaps to me you are not made of cellophane and pressed tin. choke sweetly on vinegar, turn your eyes up toward the ceiling, imagine it falls upon us. blanketed with plaster dust that mingles with our sweat and saliva. it will disappear when you avert your mind. we are driven to the bank of the arkansas river in colorado. when i say we are washed up i do not mean that we are wet. but the stones still speak to us. a language more fragile than certainty clouds our minds. their syllables, lugubrious, settle around our heads. we are cairns of silence. let your brain do your breathing for you, which fingers are mine, which fingers are yours, palm to palm, face to face, eye to eye. ‘this is what it is to taste strawberries when they have cut out your tongue,’ you think when you kiss me, and when i taste blood i know it is not yours or mine but ours. titrations of humanity. specimens. strawberries and blood and the weight of a body not mine.
i am awake now and you are gone, dissolved into the hilarious ether, and i am going to float away.
| Catcaller: | YO! |
| Me: | AVERT YOUR PATRIARCHIC MALE GAZE. |
studying alone in a dark room. i find this much too pleasant.
help i’m tired and i couldn’t give a shit.
