I don't take rejection very well why don't you just make this easier on everyone and fall madly in love with me. And, of course, you know that by 'everyone,' I mean me. I have slipped back into self absorption lately and it is not very becoming.

Bc life is not that simple or easy and you can rarely choose who you love. You can decide to continue to love someone and be there but you can't just make someone want you despite all the bad lady mag advice in the world. and why would you even want to? I just want something real, but you see, i don't even believe in love, love is a dragon I slayed long long ago so why does it continue to rise up inside me like a starving beast driven by nothing more that a primal need to survive by feasting on touch and laughter and kisses and hope and companionship and someone to go to the goddamn park with. I mean not really. I'm not really that desperate just confused about they way we all interact with each other.  And how nothing lasts. Nothing lasts so you have to get good at being okay with loss. And that is not easy bc it defies logic. The need for other humans is some animal thing i hardly comprehend. People say animals don't "feel" things like we humans do and so, fine, they don't. but they feel. I have seen a mama cow mourn her dead calf for days. literally days, walking around wailing a god awful cry. Chimps will carry their dead around with them sometimes. It is like a version of the connection is broken but the beast can't let go. Dogs that are raised together will sometimes go mad when separated...crying, chewing their fur off, becoming lethargic.

Is the point to experience as much as you can, go as far as you can, learn as much as you can, see, feel, make, become and breathe and do all you can for this flickering moment we are alive or is it to surround yourself with the people you love and cherish them every second that they are breathing? because you can't have both, sweetheart. But you may want to quit being such an extremist.

there are missing pieces

The more people i meet down here the lonelier i feel. What is that about? feeling lonely? not understood? just the absence of anyone that cares or knows you?

Its okay, I mean this experience is what it is and I will be fine....I didn't expect much when I moved here. I expected to work and go to school. I wanted things to change. and they did. because i changed them. whatever, you know. I just wasn't prepared for the endurance...of being here. I prepped for the move, for the adjustment, but now that i am here and all these people are so transient and moving about and no one is tied to anything that makes sense to me. And they like it that way. I don't -  but then again I hated feeling trapped and smothered, too. All i ever wanted to be was transient. I listened to ramblin man when i was little and i wanted that song to be about me. What is all this pain about? All of our pain? Is this chemical nightmare depression anxiety crap? Or is this Just Living. Does Living mean learning to gracefully lose things you love. (or in my case, not so gracefully...yet)

I Circle the Fish

fish swimming circles inside my skull, i am.
right, wrong
write wrong
words.
say them.

Distracted. Not liking myself very much. I want OUT of my SELF.

bad things are everywhere.

good things are everywhere, too right? promise me this.

No promise good enough to keep. How long til i get over losing you? 

yes you. all of you.

 Mistakes were made, fallen flowers landed incorrectly...near your stare.

stony stare- silent creaking stairs at midnight. Careful.

I dream about my grandmothers house so often. She died in July. The day before my 32nd birthday. I haven't been back to her house since that day. My heart is so heavy with generations of loss handed down to us so we would not forget but this is heavy how do i move? Carrying all of your hearts on my back, blood drips twirling in such cataclysmic patterns over my calves and thighs and spatters over the stars on my feet down to the earth. the dirt i want to be.

I did it all for love, but sometimes a horror down inside me suggests that I did it all for obsession. a bundle of sick chemicals. buzzing outward toward your brain circuits and empty chest.

I miss you like you are dead and since you aren't i feel as if i am cheating the beloved dead by the comparison of mourning rituals. I am not. I am not.

I miss my mother and my father and the tree outside the dirty window in the house i grew up in. I need more adjectives for my clumsy chunks of words falling like drunk fish and landing like those platform black shoes from the nineties that were so good for stomping down streets littered with paper and vomit and broken glass and the flyers from the show we drove 5 hours to see.
we were never disappointed.

I have this overwhelming desire to cry your eyes out. starve your heart out. splinters for my bone machine rusting away under waves of flesh ebbing and reaching up for the moon. something is going to change and one day it is going to be better than this.

Shake out the Ghosts

 i feel the keys beneath my fingertips....swirling.... words are senseless. I am at my parents house deep in the woods and when i am here i feel like I don't exist...like i have transferred to another realm. The only safe place on earth.
There are some things i have always suspected and one was that God didn't like me very much and the other one was that I was meant to be alone. Quite possibly, I made this up. Regardless, the adventure of The Self Fulfilling Prophecy can NOT be denied.

I have been writing stories in my head but they don't make it to paper. Or pixels. Stories about Stella and a chance meeting with an old friend at a cofeeshop downtown. In a town i have never been to. She criss-crosses an unsmoked clove cigarette between her forefingers in an effort not to smoke and has a sandwich in her purse in an effort not to eat. Over strong coffee she discussed the possibilities of a strange love that she has been denied. He leaves her alone with her sketchbook. In the story i can't decide if hot tears splash down her face, if a girlfriend texts her, or if she shrugs him off and sketches his stupid fading face.

So I just leave her there. Sitting at the table...with messy hair and a dark haired boy heading toward his car in the parking lot..after squeezing her shoulder on the way out. "Take Care, Stell" are the words he leaves her with.
Stella and her sister Gypsy Rose. Hanging out in my head reliving their childhood and their parents' death and the old pick up truck and the dusty road and countless fruitless love affairs...an overdose and  walks in the cemetery.

oh well. Sometimes i mash my fingers into my face to feel my cheekbones and jaw bones. My babyfat face has gone. Sometime in the past 4 years it flickered away. Sorry you didn't get to see it, she was a sweet girl. I feel my father in the bones in my face. My cheekbones match his. and I remind myself that i want to become Wise like him. and Just. and Fair.

In a few minutes, I am going with my mother. We are going to clean my grandmother's house. My grandmother is 90 years old and she is coming home from the hospital soon. My heart is heavy. I love her so much. She is 90 years old and she is tired and I know this.

Her father worked in the oilfield. and so did her husband. and her son. and so did my father. and my husband was supposed to, I'm sure, but i left without him. Left  the idea, i guess. It wasn't what I wanted, and hey, it's not my fault that he didn't exist. That times changed so fast and I wanted paint and poet and rock n roll. My future is so unknown. I want to go to New Mexico. The farthest thing i can imagine from a swamp. I have no idea what i am doing and i feel the past slipping away ..years, decades, a generation gone....the stories I forgot to gather have scattered away...i drip paint like tears down my face in an effort to remember what we have all lost.

I didn't fit the mold or follow the path. My heart pumps out love and hate like oil and water.

You mean nothing to no one but that is nobody's fault.

"I had a lengthy discussion about The Power of Myth / With a post-modern author who didn't exist
In this fictitious world all reality twists / I was a hopeless romantic, now I'm just turning tricks"

In our last conversation she mentioned the word "empowerment" as a way to get through life

i had heard it and read it in all this therapy/recovery stuff. empowerment. It's like sometimes you skim

the words that can't apply..(which is why i always have to re-read.) It is an Action word. something you have to DO.

Move. Act. Change. Being really avoidant,...well its a problem. I'd almost rather be terrified, frozen, prepared and

ready to fight this imaginary THING. You can't see it and i almost always can't see it but I know it is there and I have to obsess and do all these THINGS to like starve, for instance, and count and place things and cover them (ocd what have you)

suddenly you drop all that and go join an Animal Rescue Program. And you are thinking that you neglecting a small dark world that

is SCREAMING and begging for you to return but you say NO. I am putting on normal clothes and brushing my teeth and going

to pay a bill. or sign up for a class. or join an acting troupe. or actually make a friend and hang out with them and drink tea and NOT

become codependent and twisty and obsessed with their past and present and soul and brain. I am being normal. this is normal. great. now i am obsessing about being normal.

So, you know, what better way to be empowered that to be an activist for this thing you are recovered FROM?

Well, you know what? It is really hard to be an activist for a condition that no one believes you have. or had.

it is really hard to be surrounded by people who say they love you but when you form words your mouth is just

numb bc you cant make words that covey the slightest accurate portrait of what is inside you.

so you draw it and you paint it and your parents can't bear too look bc the painting are painful and 

most of the time i don't even think my therapist believes me. Anxiety. i have anxiety and i have fear.

Oh. Sorry. I thought it was God. (i really did)

i don't understand how anyone can love me if they don't know me. and i don't feel known.

i don't want to die unknown, but then in another way i kinda do. just crawl up and disappear. go away as if i never was.

that kinda sounds okay sometimes. That last love, he said, "you cant leave me bc no one knows you but me"

and it sounds like some controlling bs but the thing is, he was right. It was true. So sometimes he called me crazy but sometimes he

said My god there is nothing wrong with you. he said it so much. i got angry. i stopped taking my medicine. i stopped all of it. i didn't tell anyone. after a few months my skull was a living torture chamber for my brain. I tried to tell him what was going on.

"ohmygod see this is the shit you don't need to say. to anyone. this is the shit that is gonna get you back in the hospital.and you need to stop it bc there is nothing wrong with you. i'm going to call your parents... do they know how you are"  

i got back on my meds eventually but, like, i think everyone just kinda thought i was lame for doing so. So after that i just you know shut most people out except for my few obsessions. and he moved on and all which is great bc he was an amazing human being even though the was, of course, not equipped  with the skills to handle what the hell ever ever was wrong with  me. (NOTHING)

i "recovered" i eat. i got a job. it has been years now, since i recovered from nothing.

 i look an my paintings and  cry. i am numb and no one knows who i am.

widow's nest

ahem. sorry my posts have been random firings of estrogen bombs lately. i feel like a black widow....and angry one. Love is a hostile category for me..and the moving is exciting but stressful. i feel a little like i got ran out of my nest...an angry bird. I have a tendency to over react sometimes. And i am very lucky to have on-line friends and in-person friends and they mean much to me and when getting hurt by one person... it helps so much to remember that.

Besides the weirdness at work and moving, I found a box of my ex's things in the attic, which had to be returned. I was glad my mom there, and she didn't let me dwell on lost time. (I'm over him But not really over my twenties) Still, that was an awkward find, to say the least. But then again, i am kind of awkward in general. But that night, afterward, i dreamed that i pulled a black string out of me...out of my cheekbone. and on the end was huge disgusting meaty wad of.....grossness. i was horrified and my mom was there and she said oh its okay, just let it go, its not dangerous.

i really think that was a symbolic dream. A letting go dream. A Getting RId Of Dream. Maybe it is good to get out of that nest.