The cool autumn wind tunnelled through the trees, infrequently whipping sharp leaves into my face, my hair, my exposed arms. No moon visible to silhouette our swiftly moving forms as we made our way from cabin to cabin to cabin, the five of us. In hindsight, I have no idea why they chose me. I hadn't become particularly close with any of them during the previous seven days of church camp, and yet, there they were, on our final night together, softly knocking at my window and calling, "Jo! Jo get out here! But be quiet!" I suppose I'm just the sort of person people feel comfortable coming to when they're planning pranks or shenanigans.

Well doesn't THAT speak volumes about me.

So much has changed for a place where so little ever changes.

I might like that on my gravestone.

After all, there is life in death (if only for the worms involved,) the same way there is death in life. "Death takes many forms, even while alive." That's from a Plankeye song called Goodbye.

I know, I know. I seem a little off. I AM a little off. I've been feeling myself slowly but surely moving toward that line so thin and so invisible from far away but almost luminous up close. The one lying between genius and insanity. Between revelation and full realization. I've been having a Syd Barrett time the last few weeks... Months? Time is a tricky thing. It doesn't just go one way, after all, and I've started losing my grip on it.

Or maybe I'm getting a grip on it.

The first thing we did was move all the furniture out of three of the spacious cabins, transporting it into the cavernous hallways of the other three cabins. I say cabins because they were wooden but twelve room buildings is more accurate. Six rooms directly across from six rooms with about thirty feet between them spanning the entire building. It was hard not to make any noise moving these big orange couches straight out of 1975, but it was harder not to giggle. We took lengths of rope and tied each door handle to the one directly opposite it, leaving very little give for the doors to open inward. Of course we didn't give thought to What If There's a Fire, we were in Silly Prank Mode.

It took us about forty minutes to move everything through the woods and tie the ropes. Our collective adrenaline state once we'd finished was far too high to simply go to bed, so we skipped through the old ghost town down the pebbled path. Too far from anyone who might still hear us, we were silent nonetheless. The wild west buildings, showing their age in the form of shoddy workmanship and weather-worn wood during the daytime, turned now at night to ominous shapes, towering larger than their physical forms should allow, demanding a reverence we paid well. Hushed and under cover of darkness from the star-shielding trees, we hurried to the river's edge past the town.

Perhaps it's all just a state of perception of the world. Change your perception, change your world. My experiences with biofeedback have added support to theories of mine which most people would quickly and quite possibly accurately label Batshit Crazy. I suppose I shouldn't say I've started to lose track of time so much as I have started to gain a heavy grip on moments.

Time. It's just a series of moments. Reality click click clicking it's train-on-tracks way forward on the path that my particular pattern of consciousness chooses to follow. I cannot rule out the possibility that there are manymanymany other patterns of consciousness which started out as myself but have become different forms, branching off every time I make a decision. Every time someone else makes one for me. Or that affects me. But these clicks are the ones that have made this particular being who I am. And I am finding it increasingly easier to ... locate moments. Not just defining moments. Not just special moments. Just... *moments*.

And in doing so, I believe I have, quite accidentally, stumbled onto moments which have not yet occurred in my own life.

The one with the bright smile and deep eyes, he's staring at me again. Grinning. Grinning knowingly. But what could he possibly know that he would look at me in such a way? I deny what I feel in my heart.

I smile back. Cock my head. Stick out my tongue because I can't stand the cloak of seriousness that's seemingly followed us from the ghost town. Their laughter breaks the reverent silence and we begin to talk, these people from three churches I've met this previous week. I've pulled this silly and assinine prank with. One's a leader of one of the other youth groups, and he looks exactly like a youth group leader. Mid-twenties, goatee, spiked blonde hair, beaded hemp necklace, slender build and all. He tells us about his wife and their three month old son waiting for him back home four hundred miles from here. About his calling and how he answered it. I grin and skip rocks on the surface of the smooth and slow moving river from my sitting position.

The girl who is not me starts talking about going off to college in the spring, and the bearded early thirties guy next to me starts telling her about his grad school. They have studies in common. He says he was a missionary up until this last spring. From the looks of him, it must've been in a starving country. I keep comparing his gaunt features to her Mrs. Santa Clause Plump and Jolly ones. My upper thigh itches where it meets my shorts and I keep trying to subtley scratch it without looking like I'm scratching my ass. I fail and laughter ensues.

Deep Eyes tries to crack my shell, prying me with questions about who I am and what I do. He tells me I'm exactly the sort of intimidating girl he's always wanted to talk to but never been able to build himself up enough to approach. I say he's feeding me a line and we both laugh, but I see the pained expression in his face that tells me I just shut down a perfectly good moment of blatant honesty, the kind I'm always searching for in others, in myself. I bite my lip and make some lame attempt at a save and, thank goodness, he bites. He doesn't know I'm as frightened of boys as he is of girls like me. We volley words for half an hour and then... and then somehow the subject of Magicks arises.

I am twenty-one years old, lying on a bed in my old bedroom that is not the same one I left behind when I moved to Canada almost two full years ago. The carpet is vibrant burgundy now and my queen sized bed is slanted down and to the right because I can't figure out how to properly piece the damned frame together. So I suffer quietly, reading Brave New World for the twenty somethingth time. I am at the part where Mustapha Mond is talking with the Savage about God, and I feel his pain intensely. God making his presence known by his absence. I smell the fajitas my mother is cooking downstairs and I hear dad yelling to me, asking if I want a margarita. I do. I yell so. My tv makes a turning on noise but the screen stays black and I write it off in my head as imagination.

There are subjects I Will Not Broach Lightly and he has just found one. Still, something about this place, this starlit half-circle in which we sit at river's brink surrounded by trees out-aging all of us by decades... And something about his face, the way his eyes beckon an answer to an unasked question... There is an undefinable solace in this moment, and in this moment, for this moment only, I drop my guard and shrug off several nods. Confirmation of his theory.

The smile he sends me is a fire-lit arrow to my heart. For a split second I am convinced our eyes have burned the air away between us and we are connected. Undeniably, inconceivably connected.

The ring he digs from his shirt, hanging from a thread of necklace, he shows me in his open palm, and knows that I am the only one in this group, maybe this county, perhaps even this state, who would recognize such a thing. I stare at him in wonder and ask before I can stop myself, "Why do you keep it still?" I want to pull my words back in, but I can't. Why do I ask questions for which I already know the answer? He says, "It reminds me of a comforting time." Comforting. Comforting. I remunerate the word. Strange he would choose that word of all words, and yet not strange at all. Strange because it should not be so, deemed by the creeds to which we now lay claim, and yet not strange at all because it is to me the same. And now I understand the reason he has looked at me like that all week. The reason I've felt drawn to him in halls and across fields. We *are* connected.

I am six years old, and I am practicing being a superhero. I have my favourite blanket tucked into my shirt like a cape, the blanket that happens to be one of my sister's blankets. When she was born, so many blankets were made for her that she doesn't even like this one, which is why I sleep with it, why it's turned into my blankie. Because for her it's nothing special, not even a colour she likes, she says, so certainly I can use it. Even my prized blankie isn't mine. How true of my life so far, I think as I "fly" around the countertops. I feel my face contort in pain as my brain registers intense heat under my feet on the stove. I jump, stranded in mid-air, hitting pause on the memory so real that I feel myself there, suspended in the air, the pull of gravity begging me to let go of the moment and hit ground. I do. I hit and roll. Lay there, panting. Look down at my scorched red feet and feel fascination at their state stronger than I feel the searing pain tearing at my flesh. The air is rank and I realize it's the scent of my own flesh and am disgusted with my being.

I realize everyone is looking at us, awkward in the same silence which we are both perfectly comfortable in, and I switch to auto-happy mode. Aah, the mode that has saved many a disclosure in my life. We talk lightly of the service held earlier in the evening. I blurt out that I doubt the prophet's words in several respects, and I outright question condemningly the fit of "being drunk in the Spirit" which overtook our gathering at the worship hall toward the end of the service. It troubles me and I cannot help but worry for the spiritual well-being of our collective group to have "experienced" such a thing. People stumbling around a room, substanceless but acting intoxicated nonetheless, provoking others to join in their fun. A form of mass hysteria. I have seen such behaviour before outside the walls of any respectable church and it's presence inside of one has shaken my foundation. Deep Eyes and I share a knowing look.

Missionary breaks the glass silence following my words by clearing his throat. In a hushed tone, he tells me he knows what I mean and he agrees. Hesitantly at first but building in confidence, he begins to tell us a story...

I am twenty and I am praying for death but it will not come. I stare at the stars through my windshield and I call to them but they will not answer me. I am staring up at my eyes in my reflection in my window while the music plays and overtakes me. "People you've been before that you don't want around anymore, they push and shove and won't bend to your will... I'll keep them still." The razor flits once. Twice. Third time's the charm and the spell is broken. I gasp in tears. I can still feel, it's official. But he won't love me for long, and he won't wait for long, and I haven't wanted him for a long, long time now but I tell myself I have. I know he'll leave. I know I'll feel relieved when he does. Because I know I don't deserve happiness or anything good in my life because if I did, why would it keep being ripped from me by forces I cannot control? I smell iron. Metal. I realize I'm smelling what I'm about to taste and I chuckle quietly and lick my wound. Licking my wounds, I think to myself. I should list that under "Hobbies" somewhere.

It is the third day of a heavy revival in a small and moderately oppressed but not unknown part of the world. Missionary and his wife are helping a Senior Missionary Couple to host this group. Many have come to Christ and many have refound their faith at said revival. Three days of relentless devotion to a cause has led them to a Spirit-filled evening of prayer and worship. People singing and crying and dancing and praying and calling out in their religion to reach their God. There is one large circle of light in this tiny and dingy building where they are staying, and everyone in the circle dances and cries out to God. Missionary is helping an elderly man up from his kneeling position when he first sees signs of drunkenness overtake members of the congregation.

People are laughing. Babbling. Falling over. Shaking. Convulsing. Yelling Glory Be. Yelling Praise the Almighty. Yelling More More More Lord Yes More. People are frenzied in their signs of devotion. If a church and a frat party got together and gave birth, it would be to this. People are dancing and singing and slurring words in pulse, in time, with the music. Their tambourines slapping their thighs and hands, their drums beating out of rhythm. Missionary is concerned. Missionary's wife is deeply concerned. Suddenly people falling outside the circle of light are screaming. They are screaming and jerking and jumping back into the circle, kicking wildly at shadows in the dark. The music stops, already having been replaced by shrieks, and Missionary is frantically rushing to circle's edge, pulling up short the moment he sees what all the havoc is about.

Snakes.

Writhing black snakes, slithering around the circle's edge, latching onto people who fell out of the circle, biting every limb, every body part to leave the circle, never crossing the line of light.

I am twenty-four and I am frustrated that my street pharmacist has not come through yet with my order of sid, the little fuckup. This is why you should always trust a dealer, not a drug addict, I'm thinking to myself. He's brought something else, to pacify everyone until he can obtain the goods, he says. It's something I've never heard of before. They tell me it's the drug your brain releases when you're daydreaming, and I am skeptical as hell that it will do anything for me. The kid buzzes in my face about how it's a spiritual journey, how it'll take me to another planet, really. He repeats this over and over and I'm thinking, Kid, you have no idea how detailed my drug resume is, and you're talking out your ass. But I just say, Sure alright I guess we'll try it.

Brettlecakes was a LOT more innocent before he met me, that's for fucking sure. I am reassuring him like crazy that no matter what happens on his trip, it'll all be over in twenty minutes and the world will go back to being normal. He's never tried a psychedelic drug before and I have more than modest concern for his well-being. I've learned the hard way that you never know how someone's going to handle their first trip on something. He keeps smiling at me and nodding and needs no reassurance so I shut up and find some good trip music on my friend's nearby ipod and tune it up. It does *not* make me feel good that we're smoking this shit out of a speed pipe. He takes one hit, breathing in only for a few seconds, and starts coughing like crazy. He goes to get up and wobbles over to the kitchen sink where he starts vomitting as I'm rubbing his back. I ask if he's alright and his hugely dilated eyes themselves seem to be grinning at me. He nods, his smile huge, and just says, "Whoa." a lot. I'm rubbing his back. Eventually he curls up on the kitchen floor, hugging someone's igloo lunchbox to his face as his vomit holder. I realize all the people standing around seem to be fucking up his trip, and he's completely mellowed out in his own world now, so I lead them into the other room for my turn to smoke in an attempt to clear them the fuck out so he can have a better trip, sending back one of my friends to keep an eye on him just in case. Later he tells me he shot through space, past stars, Space Odyssey style, and for a few minutes he literally thought he was David Bowie, hah. I am amused and chalk all of this up to it being his first time on a mind-boggling adventure. I, however, am a seasoned veteran at tripping out, and scoff at the kids telling me everyone vomits their first time on this drug and I shouldn't freak out or feel bad.

Oh, how very fucking wrong my shitty, shitty ego can be. I take a big hit, for a long time, inhaling what smells and tastes like burned plastic. Everyone is cheering and saying wow and she's taking the biggest hit ever and shit and I am amused. For the first thirty seconds. Until I suddenly realize I can toke no more because my body has been turned into a large and very high powered vibrator. I sit back very suddenly and cover what feel sort of like my eyes and say, "Oooooooooooooooh fuuuuuuuuuuck," laughing with everyone else. The words vibrate out of my mouth. I feel like a huge string plucked on a cosmic guitar, and I realize I am vomitting into the trash can in front of me. Really retching it up, way worse than Brettlecakes, having taken a hit equal to about five of his. I remember very clearly thinking to myself, Jo, you are an imbecile, and you have finally found the drug that is going to do you in, you fucking idiot, you. I can't focus my vision on anything, on anything at all. The room is still here, but people keep literally disappearing and reappearing in the exact same places. The earth is rumbling and I realize nothing is real. Some dickhead inside my mind keeps repeating, "Is not all that we see and seem but a dream within a dream?" over and over. I realize this reality is nothing but a figment of my imagination, maybe an elaborate dream or some sort of simulation I built and put my essence into from some outside place unknown to this world.

I realize I'm about to wake up and I freak the fuck out. Literally, there is no way to describe the hell I went to other than freaking the fuck out. I realized this is death. This chemical, this thing I just put into my body, your brain is rumoured to release an asston as you die. This is what dying feels like. I'm dying. This is how I face death. Freaking out and vomitting and saying over and over I don't want to die, I don't want to die. I have no sense that this will ever be over. In fact, I know for a fact that if I "just let it go, man, relax," like these little fucktards who keep appearing and disappearing keep telling me to do, I will wake up a different person, or being, or something, alone outside of this entire existence, and I won't remember any of it at all. Not my elaborate history, nothing good, nothing bad, nothing. It will all be nothing. At. All. Just. Me. And even me will not be ME as I know myself to be. I don't want to return to the collective consciousness. I wanna fucking STAY. BADLY.

Bret appears. I can see him but I can't look at him, just like I can see everything else but can't look at anything, no matter how hard I try. He is my shining saviour in this pit of relentless hell. I want to tell him how much I love him, how sorry I am that I was stupid enough to try this drug, how badly I want more time with him, how badly I wanted the rest of my life to be spent with him, and how much I don't want him to waste his life just because I've died. No shit, I start saying this crap to him. He ushers everyone out of the room but I have little concept of what's going on. I am still tripping out hardcore. I feel like I've been in this state of nothingness for hours and hours. He helps me vomit more into the trashcan and gets me water, which strangely helps just a bit. I am telling him that I have seen the end and there is nothing there at all, no god, no afterlife, existence only in the form of a trace of electromagnetic activity that is very barely quantifiable as any sort of self at all. He is petting me and smiling and telling me I'm going to be fine and I'm not going to die even amidst my cries about how I'm actually dying. I realize I have a lot to fucking live for. He is the center of everything that makes me think I want to live. He's so brave and daring. He's fielding questions from people, having discussions around me. Being dashing and likeable and the best damned tripsitter I've ever fucking seen and I realize I love him more than anything, that this is someone I really want to be with, someone who can handle me properly and delicately and someone I've needed for a very long time.

I hit this point after roughly a thousand years where I realized I wasn't going to die. I mean, the shit part of the trip was over and everything came back into focus, except moving at very strange speeds. The kid drawing on the wall was drawing impossibly fast, at the same time that the kid walking across the room with a glass of water was moving impossibly slowly. It was like this and that thing are at 64x speed, and this and that thing are at .008x speed. I kept hearing Eels' song Efil's god going through my head, mostly the instrumental parts. And I saw in a way that I cannot possibly describe my connection with everything around me. The visual trip lasted about half an hour, which tells me I fucking od'd on that shit because the entire thing should only last fifteen to twenty minutes tops, and I felt great the rest of the day.

Other than feeling like a total fucking moron for being so convinced that I was dying, and having to eat my words about not throwing up, that is.

My blood went cold. The air wafting from the river is too cool for my lightweight tanktop, and I am shivering. Deep Eyes quietly places his hoodie over my shoulders, rubbing my arms, and I shoot him a look of pure gratefulness. Somewhere far upriver, a coyote howls.

Missionary says it was the first time he'd said a curse word in a long, long time. His eyes are eating up the ground in front of him, intense, staring at a place in time not too long ago. He says they stomped out the snakes. They stomped on them and threw things at them and tore apart parts of the building getting rid of them. There were congregational members covered in bites, head to toe, moaning and groaning in a suddenly sobered circle. People were weeping and gnashing their teeth and clawing at their clothing, frightened out of their minds. He said there were hundreds of snakes. He tried counting them the next day when they were burying them in the ground, but gave up after a while because it was too hard to keep track. The locals had never seen anything like this in their lives and regarded it as a bad omen. They were no longer welcomed and were forced under pain of death to leave the village the next day.

When the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on the mass grave, he said he heard the older missionary mutter, "As these snakes are buried so may our sins be."

He never asked him what he meant by that.

I've been afraid of so much for so long, with no real sense that anything's going to get better or change at all. I've let it affect everything in my life. I've destroyed everything good that has come my way. These days I'd rather panic and hide in a fucking hole when shit hits the fan. I'm nothing but a shadow of the girl who gripped her machete, eyes glinting, when a forest of overwhelming problems presented itself.

I have been tightly spiralled inside of myself since my near death experience, thinking at the speed of a cokehead. I've been led to some strange conclusions, and odd events for which I have no conclusions yet. I can visually trip on a five strip sid level now without any aid of any substance whatsoever, just from my own focus. And it has been very difficult for me, especially in the days following the death trip, to accept the thought that this reality isn't entirely dependent upon my remembering it for it to exist. For everything to exist. I keep having moments where I'm literally in another time in my life, watching and experiencing what's going on. Not even just the defining moments. Random fucking moments where I remember feeling like I wasn't alone. I can't stay, but for a split second, I can see everything exactly as it was, smell everything exactly as it was, taste everything exactly as it was... The only possible explanations are that A)I'm skipping back to a specific moment in time, B)my memory is becoming sharper and more vivid than it has ever been before despite it already being considerably sharper and more vivid than other people's, or C)I am quite literally going batshit crazy.

I keep thinking... well, this is a thought I've had for a very long time, actually, and deserves a much longer segment and far more detail than I'm giving it here, but I've been writing for four and a half hours and would like to go to bed before too long... but I keep well, wondering, I suppose, about insanity.

I mean, just for a moment, bear with me here, and suppose that it were completely possible to travel outside of your body. Back in time or across the world or wherever. Not with your body, but with your mind. And suppose that the collective consciousness of people is what keeps our reality together. Miracles would be a fluke, a break in the collective acceptance of reality. An anomaly. One that doesn't quite fit, that can't fit, into the world around us and just for a moment, breaks free and then can't find it's way back to the proper body. Or imagines it took the body with it, or doesn't want to go back to the body in our realm, or doesn't need a body where it went. Our reality cannot accept a total disappearance of person, and so we still see a shell of a body, one we imagine isn't completely hollow. We would still see a body and basic motor functioning but no solid personality because it would be too difficult to actually reconstruct an entire personality and all that it entails with any sense of accuracy and so instead we get a drooling fuckup of a body which we place in a hospital or a home. All I'm saying is what if that autistic kid functioning in his own world is, in actuality (his personal reality,) painting in elysian fields beyond anyone else on this plane of existence's imagination? And... fuck... my muddled brain is not doing a good job of laying all of this out, I dare say. All I know is that I'm still almost bloody well convinced that if I had "let go" while I was tripping out, I'd be in a coma right now, or worse, but likely some sort of coma. It's all just a thought, anyway. A highly incomplete one, at that.

It is highly unsettling to feel your sanity slipping away.

Our hurried shadows move with us like ghouls through the woods. Deep Eyes and me, we're in the same building, so we cut away from the others with hushed Goodnights toward our cabin. Time got away from us and it's much closer to dawn than we'd like it to be. Only another hour or so before the first shift from night to light, which means little to no sleep and an exhausting trip back to Austin.

Still, I have no regrets about staying out so late. Deep Eyes' warm hoodie still hugs my body as I get back to my partially opened window. He says, "Try not to wake anyone in your room." I grin and chuckle, shaking my head. "You should hear my roommates' snoring," I say. "Not a problem, they sleep like rocks, dead to the world." He smiles and our eyes linger a moment on each other before I quip, "Welp, how about a boost up?" His face is animated once more as he leans down and offers my foot his interlocked hands. I slide through the window and drop noiselessly to the floor. I used to practice this shit. Moving without making noise. More than I'd like to admit I had free time on my hands. I turn to the window and grip the windowsill, standing on my tippy toes and leaning my head halfway out the window to meet his. "Night," I whisper, kissing his cheek quickly before promptly disappearing from sight.

I kick off my shoes and crawl into the bed with only one roommate in it before I realize I'm still wearing his hoodie. For a moment I'm startled, then a smile just won't stop creeping across my face. I cuddle deeper into it and stare at a wall until I drift into sleep, dreaming of snakes out of place.

It's probably not the worst thing the neurologist could have said, but it's certainly not the best. I doubt anyone would like being given a choice between migraine, brain aneurysm or brain tumor. Fortunately I was so sick when he delivered the news that I didn't fall apart. I think it's also because I'd really suspected as much. I mean, I've had migraines before, but none have ever lasted longer than three days tops.

Needless to say, on the thirteenth day of my teeth-grinding, light-makes-me-wince, sometimes stabbing, always dull pounding hellion of a headache, I was just relieved to receive a prescription I hoped would help.

It actually started before I realized it had started, back when I was running around getting ready for all of my school stuff. All of my classes were changed to 12 week sessions, by the way, in a last minute attempt to destress myself and give some room for preparing myself... which means I start in a week if I start at all. Anyhow, I was going back and forth from campus to campus when I got a call from a best friend who has recently become a co-worker of mine, and while chatting with him on the phone, I caught sight of myself in my rearview mirror and realized that my pupils were two very noticeably different sizes. I mused aloud about it on the phone, then shrugged it off as one of the weirdest new things I've seen my body do as of late.

Two days later I changed all my classes and babycakes and I made an overnight trip out of town to visit his family in Houston. My root canal tooth started hurting the same day, but I sort of blew it off and tried to put it out of my mind until the next afternoon when it hurt so badly I decided I'd go back to the dentist the following monday. I was supposed to go visit one of our inmates on friday, but when I woke up that morning I couldn't even form words because of the pain in my mouth, so I had to cancel. That's really the day the headache grabbed hold and wrestled me to the ground and then started beating in my skull until I found myself helpless in it's grasp.

Friday night my head hurt so badly I seriously considered going to the emergency room.
Saturday I spent all day talking myself out of visiting the emergency room in favour of going to the dentist on monday, convincing myself the snake swimming around under my skull on the left side of my brain was related to the tooth pain.
Sunday night I told Bret that if I died in the middle of the night, I wanted him to have anything in my room to remember me by, anything at all; I wanted him to tell my family I loved them very much and was sorry I wasn't the best child and sibling I could have been; and I wanted him to know he's the single best thing that has ever happened to me in the romance department of my life (True Story.)

Monday morning I was surprised to wake up. The dentist told me the root canal was infected and that they were sending me to an endodontist to have it redone. I cannot possibly convey to you how exceedingly thrilled I was at the prospect of having a root canal done a second time on the same motherfucking tooth. The nurse told me as I was checking out that a lot of my symptoms wouldn't have been related to the tooth pain, and she asked if I was seeing a neurologist.

So I saw a neurologist who said, "We need a scan of your brain."
"Oh it's still there, I promise. I use it all the time." You should have seen the slew of jokes I was making with everyone from the doctors to the nurses to the paramedics when I fractured my spleen last year. I'm a riot when my health is in trouble. It's hard enough for these people to deliver bad news; the last thing they need to have is an uncooperative patient who makes life harder for them.

My neurologist is adorable. He graduated from Harvard Med sometime in the early sixties. He wears things like brown corduroy pants with brown loafers, a light blue shirt, a purple silk vest spotted with white polka dots, and a little burgundy bowtie with white polka dots on it. He looks like he got dressed in the dark in a clown's closet, it's awesome.

The endodontist told me I had to go back to my regular dentist and have the crown pulled to make sure the tooth can be saved because the original fuckwit dentist who did the root canal didn't get the crown to cover the entire tooth and he feared leakage and re-infection. I found a new dentist, one I like. We took more pictures of my face, and even though it took them six different times to get the xray the dentist wanted, I finally got to hear what I wanted: pull the fucking tooth. God that's what I wanted to do in the first place, but my old dentist wanted to retreat. Anyway, the antibiotics I'd been on for nine days hadn't taken out the infection, and in the meantime I'd gained a horrible case of the flu, bronchitis, an inner ear infection and a sinus infection as well as hitting a fever of 103.2 which didn't break until yesterday morning, having lasted six days. So my shiny new dentist gave me a stronger antibiotic which seems to be taking out everything in it's path, as well as norco, which is sort of like vicodin except it has twice as much morphine content and less acetaminophen.

The neurologist gave me a few medications for when a migraine returns, as well as a daily prescription for a drug called trazodone. It's apparently an old school anti-depressant which helps a lot with sleep and energy as well as headache control. He gave me a considerably high dosage and it did the trick immediately. My headache faded into oblivion with the introduction of clindomyacin, norco, nyquil, dayquil cough, and trazodone into my system all at once. Of course when I woke up thursday morning and went to the doctor's office, I ended up barfing up all the water I'd had and the whole orange I'd eaten for breakfast. Really I think that's because I tried to start eating again after days and days of my rockin' diet composed of water, crackers and cough drops.

I won't know the results of the CAT scan until next wednesday when I check in with the neurologist again. I've been going stir crazy with not leaving my bedroom for weeks on end except to infrequently visit doctors and clinics, but there's very little I can do about it.

As of today, I can eat normal food again, if I'm careful to focus on not throwing up and it's in small enough amounts. I'm still coughing like crazy but if I suck on enough cough drops I can talk quietly for a few minutes at a time without hacking up my lungs. My fever's gone, my sinus infection's gone, my inner ear infection is finally almost gone though it still hurts a lot when I swallow. My headache is back but under control. The snake crawled across the top of my skull about a week ago and settled in on the opposite side of my head, so now I have this headband of pain that spans both hemispheres, but at least the trazodone makes it quieter. My body's no longer shaking for no apparent reason from time to time, I'm not stricken with chills, I'm not hallucinating, I'm not passing out without warning anymore, and my eyes aren't shaking violently back and forth. I have pretty bad indigestion, but that's a gift from the antibiotics.

I feel disturbingly naked and disconcerted. For the first time in nine years, I have not a single piercing in my body. I had to take them all out for the scan, and I haven't put them back. I'm contemplating leaving the industrial out, maybe the conch, too. But I'd like to put the nape back. In fact, if it turns out to be a migraine like I'm hoping and praying it is, I'm thinking I'll get a mini corset shaped nape set back there. Or maybe just a giant bull ring. My nape piercing has been exceedingly comforting to me since I've received it, and having it not there emotionally disturbs me to the point of tears. It's like my security blanket. That sounds silly, I know, but it is. I reach back there and fondle it and it centers me. Man, I didn't realize how long the bar he put in was until I had to take it out. Now there's just two holes and that's not comforting at all.

I feel weird having short hair now because I feel like everyone can see the missing bar, even though I haven't been many places or really seen anyone I know other than my boyfriend since I got the haircut a few weeks ago due to this illness. It's an uncomfortable nakedness. Like Adam felt in the garden with God. Shame. Disquiet. And I miss it like I'd miss a best friend.

Peanut Brettles says he wants to pay for me to get a new one if we can't get the bar back through. He's so sweet and understanding. It's just funny how my emotions have been this insane roller coaster since this all started. And I still can't bring myself to call my therapist and tell him anything.

That norco is pounding on my brain, so I'm afraid it's naptime.

Thanks for listening. You did it just right.

I just got back from jumping through the hoops necessary to go back to school. I figured I'd take it easy on myself by enrolling at ACC (because it's a hell of a lot smarter to take transferable courses from a school where they'll cost a fraction of what a big university would cost than to not,) and taking fun courses mixed in with necessary ones. Hopefully I'll get back into the groove and actually WANT to attend school.

You have no idea how terrifying this prospect is to me.

The thought of being 24 and sitting in a classroom with a bunch of airheaded eighteen year olds still wearing their pajamas is just suffocatingly scary to me.

While it's entirely possible to accomplish the things I want to accomplish with my life without having a college degree, I figured it couldn't hurt, either.

I met with a counsellor today who suggested a lot of different things, but one particularly interesting portion of my meeting with her bears repeating:

Because I didn't know what was going to be required of me, in usual Jo-Fashion I overdid it. I brought everything with me. And by everything I mean everything. From high school transcripts to certificates of college courses completed to my birth certificate and social security card. I set all the stuff on the counsellor's desk for... review or something, I don't really know why I thought she'd be wanting it. Anyhow, she asked me what I was interested in, and I was fucking stumped momentarily. It took me a minute to work past the anxious ball in my throat and come up with, "Well I can tell you what I'm NOT interested in. Math. I fucking hate math. I suck at it, and I'd like to avoid it as long as possible."

She blinks. Says, "Wait..." Scans through my transcript again. Says, "It... It says here you got a 97 in Geometry... and... a 98 in Trigonometry..." Peers over her glasses at me, "Are you sure you don't like math?"

I clear my throat and lean forward, pointing at the sheet, and offer nervously, "Ah, yes, well, but, do you see all those hundreds on the rest of the transcript? Those, those are the subjects I'm good at. Yeah, I just ah, I just suck at math."

Her head stays tilted down into her neck, her eyes still peering disbelievingly at me over her glasses for about ten seconds of silence. Then she takes on a tone I've only ever heard from large black women challenging someone on something, and says, "Has anyone ever talked to you about realistic expectations? Girl, you gotta get your head on straight."

She talked me into taking one math course, which I'll sign up for on Monday if they still have room left. But I kept thinking about that conversation on the way back to the office and then home. Ever since our first session together, my psych has consistently told me that my expectations for myself are unrealistically high and my expectations for other people are pathetically low, or something equivalent. I thought I'd worked a lot on that, but today I realized there's more work to be done.

On the bright side, I'm starting to straighten the shit in my life out, and I can't even express to you how good it feels to start organizing things. The way I think, it's like, I have these obstacles in the way of me feeling happy, and I put them there myself, but it's so hard to remove them without accomplishing whatever needs to be done to change it's status from Obstacle to Past Experience. I tell myself that once I've completed a laundry list of things in my life, I'll be happy and have time to relax. Only when I've completed that list, a NEW list has already been compiled, so I tell myself again, just this list and then I'll be happy and have time to rest. But it never works out that way at all.

I haven't talked to Andrew in weeks now. I probably should. It's crazy bizarre to look at the person I was three years ago and how insanely much I've changed for the better. I mean, for the most part, my fears, neuroses, and qualms have been either laid to rest or put under relatively stable control. I'm no longer a complete trainwreck. In fact, truth be told, the engineers put their minds together, devised a newer, more efficient train and track, and even though it's still classified as in trial stages, it's been operating fantastically with only a few bumps and glitches here and there.

And just like other areas of my life, now that I know *how* to enroll (or rather, re-enroll,) in school, I'll be a lot less terrified next time around and will likely even register early.

Suck on that, Formerly Afraid Self.

It's been ten minutes since I dropped, and I don't expect to hallucinate for another fifty.

The wait sucks.

I know. I know I know I know. I haven't written anything in months. My life is consumed by my boyfriend at this point, and I am fucking terrified at how much I adorelovetreasureobsesscomfortfeelbreatheLIVE him now, because if he leaves, there goes my everything again. But I don't want to write about that right now.

My hair is blue and pink. Mostly blue but with pink bangs. Tomorrow I'm all but shaving it off and bleaching it and dying it another color as yet to be decided by the Fates. But I don't want to write about that, either.

What I want to write about, in the fifteen minutes I have before he gets here and we go a-tripping ever so softly through nearby fields and assorted greenery and eventually a Wal Mart no doubt, is Failure.

I am now officially four months behind on my book project, and have been all but given a Write Us Again When You're Serious Notice, which is alright I suppose, except that I'm still a motherfucking chunk of a human being. Being so makes me miserable. With that in mind, allow me to relay to you, Dearest Diary, the sordid event that occurred last night, inciting me to write another entry online, despite the multiple ones I script daily in my head.

Babycakes and I are walking around the mall, hitting up sales, buying things we need and things we crave, when we roll into one of those Haughty Express Stores where toothpicks and muscles cajole you into buying too trendy clothes. The Hunt for Jeans ensues. Babykins is skinnier now than when I met him, and needs his clothes to follow suit. He wants me to pick out items I'll find sexy as hell on him. Not hard. I pick out several pairs in different colors and styles and he heads off to the dressing room.

For those of you who don't know, when you stick my twenty year old skinny-cut boyfriend in a pair of pre-washed jeans and a red polo with a black leather wristband, he looks like he belongs in a magazine somewhere, beckoning you to buy the latest Consumer Whore Clothing. Really. Gooey doe-brown eyes and flopsy too-hip-to-be-a-hipster-hip-hair and flawless complexion tell you you're not going anywhere until he's ready to lose your attention.

This redheaded stick who works there keeps checking him out, every time he comes out to show me the jeans he has on, to ask my opinion, to bend and flex around. Nothing unusual. One of the downsides to dating someone extremely attractive is that your same sex admires them frequently.

While he's in the dressing room for the fourth time or so, the following conversation takes places between Red and I:

Red: "Wow. Wow wow wow your brother is HOT."
Blue: "Um, thanks, lots of girls seem to think so, but if you're talking about him," *motions to dressing room door*, "...that's my boyfriend."
Red, surprised and unabashedly showing it: "BOYFRIEND? What?!"
Blue, firmly and uncomfortably: "Yeah, boyfriend."
Red: "Reeeeally. Oh. Well Hmmmm."

The way she said, "Reeeeeeeeeally" was the way you'd respond to a teenage boy who comes home and announces he's going to marry his first girlfriend. It was, Okay, I believe you, but not really, because that's ludicrous.

Of course Babykins being the penultimate perfection comes out of the dressing room, hugs me, presses into me, cradles my face in his hands with that intense stare and lays one on me.

He hadn't heard the conversation but his timing couldn't have been better.

Later I told him about it, because it kept bothering me. Yes, I know, my boyfriend is way the fuck out of my league in terms of physical beauty. On the other hand, were I to shed the weight and bother caring about my appearance again, he and I could go toe to toe in terms of looks.

He held me and loved me and told me he wasn't going anywhere and that he loves my body very much as is.

That makes one of us.

Today I did another five hundred crunches. I'm seriously contemplating becoming a speed freak for a few months to make myself all stickly again. I know he says otherwise, but I feel like I have a time limit to prove I can change and will change.

Dear God. It's only been 20 minutes and it's already starting to kick in. Wind on grass waves effects. This'll be a fun trip.

And let's hope this minute entry will encourage me to write further about things that matter.

Or hell. Write at *all*.

"By the way, your room is haunted," would have been a nice introductory statement, rather than letting me slowly but surely piece the puzzle together myself.

The television that came with this fully furnished room is old enough to have entertained several generations of dinosaurs, but I thought nothing of this, as it is large and very useful for putting me to sleep. The thing about Old Things is that they have History. Previous owners. Disturbances in energy happening in and through and around them. The woman who owns this house, she's lived here since the early seventies, and her family owned it decades before then. It is full of character and old ghosts in a way I find to be quite unexpected.

The first morning I awoke in my new room to an untimely and alarmingly loud preacher on the television. In my befuddled, just-waking-up state of mind, I groggily observed and stored in the back of my mind for later contemplation two facts: one being that I had not turned on the television, as the remote control was across the room and I was quite sure I had turned it off the night before, having awoken to the black screen several times during the night; the second being that the television was on a different channel than the one I had turned it off on the night previous. Later in the day when I truly awoke and contemplated the situation, I decided that the television was old and quirky and probably had some sort of short. That maybe it just always came on that channel and I'd figure it out eventually.

The second morning was uneventful.

As was the third.

On the fourth morning, I awoke much earlier than I would have liked to blaring music from a country station on the telly, of all things, something I would never, EVER turn to, much less leave the television on at night. This time I was quite sure I hadn't left the television on, but it occured to me that there was likely a timer on the tv that the former resident had set forever ago to turn on the tv at a certain time, and all I had to do was swap it off. I couldn't figure out why the channel was different again, but I chalked it up once more to Quirky TV. I checked the remote, but there was no button for setting a timer, nor was there one on the set itself, but it's an old thing and the controller is obviously not the original. I made a mental note to ask the wonderful woman I live with about how to turn it off the next time I spoke with her.

Of course, it being me, I simply forgot, and then kept forgetting, and then started observing bizarre patterns in the television's behaviour. First of all, it only turns itself on in the mornings, but not on any regular schedule. One week it may be sunday, monday, thursday, and saturday mornings at 7, 5:30, 6:15 and 7:45 respectively, whereas the week following it will be sunday, tuesday, thursday, friday and saturday mornings at 8, 7, 6, 5, and 5:30 respectively. I mean, it really is randomly out of whack. I therefore concluded it was some sort of weird short, something wired incorrectly, something beyond my very limited knowledge of all the innermost workings of the television. Still, this feeling I've had from day one just won't... quite... leave...

Have you ever been laying about with your eyes closed, resting, and someone tries to sneak up on you, only you feel their presence in the room before they even get close? That's how I feel every time I walk in my room. There have only been two times I haven't felt that way in the two months I've been living here; both times the television would not turn on. I'd leave, or read, and, hours later when the feeling'd returned, I'd attempt to flip on the telly and it would once again magically work. I laughed and called it old and tainted, which is the most likely story, in my not so humble opinion.

Then a time came a few weeks ago when I was home in the middle of the day, quite alone. As I'm OCD, I have a thing about checking locks. I go around and check them lots. Ask my boyfriend. I'm a fucking nutjob. "Hon, did you lock the car?"
"Yes dearest, and don't worry, I checked the handle four times," has become a too-familiar conversation, heh. Especially the days when I'm in this big old house all by my lonesome self.

There is a very short hallway between my room and the main living room, and in that hallway is the door to my bathroom. One has to go through my hallway and my room to reach the laundry room, and other than that, my room is connected to nothing else. I have my own private entrance door in my room which leads out into the side garden, nothing more. The door has two locks on it, one of which only my key will open, and when I am alone, both are locked. I wish you had seen the layout of my house. It would reveal more to you of what I'm about to tell you than any mere description possibly could. Prepare for a small dose of TMI:

So I'm sitting on the toilet with the door closed when I quite clearly hear someone walk through the hallway, into my room, open the doors to the laundry room, and then turn on the washing machine. I figure the maids are here, and as I haven't gotten a chance to meet them yet and thank them for the fabulous job they do, I hurry my ass up (not literally, you perverts,) wash my hands, and am out of there by the time I hear the washing machine start filling up with water. Funny thing, but I could SWEAR my room was colder than it was before, like walking into a cold front or standing five feet from a walk in freezer. And the second I step foot in my room, I know something's wrong. My heart drops into the bottom of my stomach and I get all nauseous. Nervous. Nervous more than anything. And fearstruck. Like I'm about to meet the principal who will give me the whipping I always dreaded and never received as a child.

I look around my room and no one's there. I walk into the laundry room and no one's there. Let me reiterate: someone has just pulled the washing machine button as it's hardly filled at all with water, perhaps thirty second's worth, and there's no one else in the room but me. I whip my head up toward my door. Both locks are locked. The bottom one you can't lock from outside as there is no key, the top one HAS to have my key in it to unlock or lock from outside, and my keys are on my dresser.

I sprint on my wobbly legs into the living room, thinking I'm about to catch a burglar. Why a burglar would break in and turn on a washing machine I don't know, but it's what seemed most logical at the time, as I had glanced outside and only seen my car (read: no maid's vehicles,) out front. No one's in the living room. The front door's locked, also with a lock that can only be done from the inside. I head off the other front door, which is also locked, again with the Only Inside Lock. The back door is a dead end but I explore it anyway. Nothin'. Now, if the house were devoid of large pieces of furniture and knick knacks everywhere, it is conceivable that one could easily make a circle through a specific part of the house. As it is, that door is blocked by furniture, therefore it cannot be opened and the connection to a circle cannot be made. Basically, playing hide and seek would be way too fucking easy in this house, as going one direction and checking everything is insanely easy, thus giving no hope to those who would seek to sneak past you to home base. And I check every nook and cranny after making sure no one'd potentially escaped. I was going to hand this guy his ass for having the nerve. I even checked upstairs.

You guessed it. Nothing. I was completely and totally alone. I was horribly confused at this turn of events. I mean, I literally sat down on the couch, brows furrowed, trying to figure out how someone could have moved so quickly, or else how a washing machine could have turned itself on. I have felt the malevolent draft only once since, when someone was walking on the squeaky dining room floorboards (god I love old wooden floors,) toward the kitchen where I was late one night. The squeaking stopped, so I peered around the corner to say Hello to whomever was there, only to discover that same fearful chill of cold, and no one standing there. Bedroom doors behind Whoever It Is Who Isn't There were both quite shut with lights out, my fellow housemates snoring contentedly behind their safe little sheets. I'd love to embellish and say I heard breathing or saw eyes or something, but the truth is that the squeak of heavy weight being placed on floorboard after floorboard toward the kitchen and the feeling of utterly nervous helplessness were the only things that were there.

I made a mistake of which I have not yet informed my boyfriend. One of the two nights we've spent apart since meeting, I had a dream where I unplugged the tv before I went to bed, but it came on in the morning anyway. I got up, awestruck, and picked up the cord with the metal prongs in my hand. After a few moments of being scared witless, I barked at the tv, "Off! I command you by Power of the Name of He that is in me!" And off went the television. Shaking, I crawled back between the sheets and eventually talked myself back into sleeping. The dream felt incredibly real, but I've had the occasional reeks-of-reality-even-though-it's-not-dream ever since I was taking Lexapro. When I awoke in the morning, the power cord was indeed unplugged. Therefore it must have been a simple dream, yes? So I didn't take it seriously or give it much contemplation.

Three weeks ago the boyfriend says the funniest thing to me. He says, "Hey, this morning I saw the television setting it's own timer on the screen." I smile and believe him because I love him, but do not fully believe him as I do not fully believe any of this is happening myself.

So. Roughly a week and a half or two ago, I'm talking with the wonderful lady I live with, and we're covering a slew of topics. Out of nowhere, she says, "Oh, by the way, has the television been turning itself on again?"
I light up. "Oh yes," I say, "I figure there's some sort of timer on it, but it doesn't seem to be consistent. Please tell me you know how to set the thing."
She looks awkward. She says, "Um, well, that tv..." and trails off, eyes wistfully searching some nostalgic picture just over my right shoulder before continuing. "That tv," she says, "it belonged to my father. And, well, you know, he died. And it will go months and months without working at all, but then anytime I start to think about him a lot, it seems to work just fine, you know. I mean it will turn on and have all the channels and everything."
I'm curious slash cynical, so I probe, "Uh, you mean, it doesn't work unless you're thinking about him a lot?"
She says, "Well I really only have to think of him a lot for a while, and it'll work for longer, but eventually stop working until I think about him again"
I say, "Oh," feeling awkward and not knowing what else to say. I shuffle clothes and fiddle with my fingers.
She says, voice somewhat low (and later it occurs to me that possibly because we are in the far end of a room which holds said tv set in it,) "I know it sometimes turns itself on in the mornings, and that always used to freak my son's girlfriend out if she was spending the night here, so he'd just unplug it at night and usually there'd be no problem."

It takes about three seconds of swinging the hammer back before it swooshes in and hits the gong of my brain, resonating her word choice of usually, usually, usually over and over again until I had no peace. I quickly throw out there, "Hey do you know how to fix the timer, or just turn it off?"
She pauses folding and, leaning back, says in an almost surprised-that-I'd-even-ask-tone, "Oh honey, there's no timer on that television. It's too old."
I blink.
And blink again.
And blink yet again.
And fumble for words but find none, so I change the subject. Later I look up the set's model online, read through the specs and what have you only to discover she's right, there IS no timer. I don't know why that surprised me. She said the spirit in the house is a friendly one, that it's probably just her dad, hanging around. I wonder if she knows there is more than one? Because really, it's not that I couldn't find words, it's that I kept finding words that were TOTALLY inappropriate. I wanted to ask her who has died in this house. Who. Because I'm pretty fucking sure it's still pissed about it. But I'll figure it out eventually, so help me. I know her brother was murdered, but I don't know when or where or how. This house, this house is overflowing with history, and I have spent so much time dulling my senses, but I will no longer. I won't open myself back up to *too* much sensitivity, but I'll remove my dullard's habit of blocking out the whole thing.

Two days ago the boyfriend says, "Hey Jo, ssssssssssssst, wake up honey. Hey look, the tv's setting it's timer again."

And now I've seen it, too. Click click click whir shuffle click. Deciding when we'll wake up this week. He leapt out of bed and turned it off, muttering, "Asshole," at the television set.

But it's not the energy coming from the tv I'm worried about.

Not. At. All.

I am now Here: http://nablopomo.ning.com/profile/exnihilonihilfit

It's not a permanent move, it's just more of a Daily Activities/Rants/Whatevers of Me. I'm participating in the National Blog Posting Month challenge, which requires writing on a daily basis. My blog's sort of middle of the page there.

Anyhuays, feel free to comment there too, as anyone can comment on either of these currently running blogs.

Slash I should really update this one, too.

I was supposed to make this public, not private like a month ago. Oops.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I love it when people say they wish they could get inside my head, like it wasn't all dark and scary and frantic in here. For a full day this last weekend, I managed to scribble down one blurb per hour. Something I thought, something I did, something that was said, I filled my pockets with these scratched-on pink and orange sticky notes, with these corners of napkins and torn receipts. It'll be like we spent the day together. Sort of.

Here they are in all their explanation-free, hourless glory:

One: You being the glass of ice water I immersed my burned hand in. A temporary refuge. A numbing device. Momentarily relieving the pain. I knew it would return once the Effects of you wore off. Still, the break in the fiery torment was well worth the frustration of knowing it would not suffice for eternity.


Two: My sunburned tummy's skin is peeling no matter how many times a day I slather on the lotion. It sounds like syran wrap, coming off. ssssssssssss. It has the texture of rice paper. Why is picking it off my body so fucking fascinating to me? Like I'm peeling away layers, and maybe if enough go, I'll find myself behind them. I say that as though I were lost. Pfft.


Three: Vomitface vomitface vomitface make the numbers STOP scrolling every time I close my eyes. It's like I'm thinking in fucking hex code.


Four: I had a dream about her, just now, where I spoke and she listened. I wish I could burst forth with all my stored knowledge and tell her everything, because she deserves better, but my word is my bond and I do not lightly break it, I do not heavily break it, I do not break it period, because that would be saying I am untrustworthy and I am not. I do not share the secrets of others. Still, it'd be nice if I could just telepathically transmit my feelings about the matter and let her see that way. Note to Self: Work on Telepathy Skills.


Five: I can't get it out of my head. I forget it and remember it an hour later. Because it was Perfect. It was Truth. Standing there in the cold dark of my room, he's whispering he loves me, he loves me, he loves me, and then he says it, he finally says it, what he really feels, what he really means, and the spirit of Truth leaps in me for recognizing Truth in his words, and the sorrow of Revelation encompasses my being: "I love the way you make me feel." ...Why does this come to me now? I wish my subconscious would buy a fucking megaphone already and stop speaking to me in quizzes and riddles.


Six: I know what the child whose security blanket has been ripped from his arms feels like. That sudden terror. The jolt that leaves you in a wake of temporarily amnesiatic nothingness wondering why you're so frightened when there's no Obvious Threat facing you in that moment, and why you felt so secure moments before and how to get back there, if you only could.

It's how I feel every morning when I wake up.


Seven: He gingerly holds my cup as he refills it, soft smile playing at the corners of his mouth, eyes darting back and forth from mine. At the exact moment he tells me I have gorgeous eyes, I'm thinking about how stark green his are. They're the colour of lushy fields of spring blooming. The shallow end of an algae-bottomed lake. Cut jade Chinese dragons. Emerald Beryl. They're the same colour as the cold viridian stone in his necklace. I tell him this and they light up to match the smile on his face. Five minutes later, he's changed clothes and joins me at my table, saying the meal's free. It's all Rubiks Cubes and thousand piece puzzles from there.


Eight: Once the elbow's out, you know you're going to be okay. You reach that certain point, when you're changing clothes and driving simultaneously, where your elbow bursts free from your shirt and you know you've got it from there, it's familiar territory, it's nothing you can't handle.

I need that breathing point of relief in my life.


Nine:  Somedays I wish I had telekinesis just so I could flip and roll cars that viciously cut other people off, because I think, Well that would teach the assholes to drive as though we were all members of the same human race. But in reality, they'd probably just emerge, shaken and terrified, asking WHY ME WHY ME, as though they had no idea how cruel they had been to others.

...I would make a *terrible* god.


Ten: I want to walk into pictures all the time. A blue moon hanging solo over evergreens in a sky streaked with nothingness. A quiet villa overlooking a jagged Mediterranean coastline. A gnarled and twisted tree spiralling toward a barren sky. I want to climb it. I want to live in the villa. I want to tiptoe across the treetops and swing from the moon. If only my reality were that subjective.


Eleven: I should start a blog based solely on my social experiments. This woman leaving her car in the parking lot, she was so troubled... I took the lipstick I found this morning, the bright pink stuff? I wrote "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" in all caps across her windshield once she was inside, even though it's not physically true, because we are all valuable (&ohifonlyMOREpeopleSAWthatweareallbeautifulinsomeway!!!) When she got back just now, she dropped her bags. She looked around. She crawled into her car the way children scramble into dark tunnels. She gripped the steering wheel like a little old woman holding a basket and started sobbing. She looked so... frail. I wonder if she cried because she needed to see that, or because some asshole put neon pink lipstick on her windshield? I'm going to fucking hell for sure. Paved with my good intentions.


Twelve: I bet when I get to be his age my eyes will be as misty grey blue as his are. Like a storm at sea in twilight fog. They are all smiles and laughter and twinkling eyes, and it feels good to be in their midst. It feels like home.


Thirteen: If she tells that story one more time I'm going to start banging my fucking head against the table. I can already hear his laughter, and he's the only one here who'd catch my drift.


Fourteen: We try on sunglasses and make faces at each other. We pretend to be people other than who we are. We waltz around the store insulting objects and cheerily scheming about ways we could make trouble in which we never will. And it's just like childhood again, she makes me feel like I'm so funny. No one laughs at my jokes and jests like she does. And it's just like childhood again, me oodling my approval all over her. That fleeting flicker when her eye catches mine to see if I think she's as funny as she thinks she is. And it's just like childhood again,

...only this time we really honest to goodness Love each other.


Fifteen:  "Carrots and beer... what a bad, bad, bad fuckin' idea," she says as she eats her carrots and drinks her beer, giggling at herself in the rearview mirror and speaking aloud in third person.


Sixteen: "The person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him who has learned the error of undue loneliness has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom, or am I off target?" Escher said that to his son Arthur November 1955. Why does it come to me now? Or am I just unwilling to put to paper the way I truly feel at this moment?


Seventeen: All her pictures, she wasn't smiling in one. All her pictures, sad and tragic. All her pictures, she'd just been told her family died. Told she couldn't have children. Told the cancer had spread too much to save her. I make a joke and she laughs. And I realize she's more beautiful melancholy.


Eighteen: I had a wistful moment more severe in it's intensity than I could possibly portray. It feels like my heart's calling out to love someone, something, and if I don't listen, it's threatening to leave my chest and walk off in it's own pursuit. Sometimes I feel it knocking against my ribs, like just now. Prying it's way through. That empty ache, ah. "Alas, who here could understand? And so I think of you, old friend, oh troubler of my midnight dreams!"


Nineteen: He hits the rewind button and asks, "Did you hear that? I never really listened to the lyrics but I need to hear this. Did you hear that?" I say no, even though I did. He hits the rewind one minute in. He hits the rewind two minutes in. Over and over again until I think I will hate this song the next 50 times that I hear it in a row. When he asks "Did you hear that?" I find I can no longer hear that, all I can see are his skeleton fingers, his soft bright eyes sinking into his skeletor face and I want to melt into his lips.  "Did you hear that?" he says and hits Rewind thirty seconds from the song's ending. I begin to wonder if he is simply afraid of hearing what song comes after this one.


Twenty: I dislike questions like, Summer or Winter? Because my answer, Fall and Spring, always makes me sound like a douchebag. But it's true. This year, the smell of fall nostalgia reminds me of him. No wonder I feel sickly when I wander outside.


Twenty One:  He makes me feel like I'm Audrey Hepburn in Carey Grant's arms.


Twenty Two: It's the smell of his hair, No. It's his gentle touch, No. It's those big brown Bambi eyes sucking me in like a vortex, wrapping and sliding their gaze around me like tentacles of energy, pulling me in, like the slow start of a rollercoaster. Click click click click click click click click uphill.

And then PLUNGE.


Twenty Three: A mini supernova in my chest ; the star explodes into a trillion shards of light and pain, each extending to the furthest reaches of every last molecule in my body where I find myself here, in your arms, asunder


Twenty Four: He says that I'm beautiful, then he turns out the light.

This year, I will fall in love again.
And when I love, I will love with the same reckless abandon for my own interests which I have loved with before.
I will keep my heart as open as it has been.
I will cherish my vulnerability and nourish it so as not to lose it.
I will learn the difference between compromising all the time and compromising when it is the right thing to do.
I will continue to check my depression when it rears it's ugly head.
I will remind myself daily that I am valuable, that I am loved.
I will keep doing the things that make other people think I'm a beautiful creature, because those things are a huge part of who I am.
I will strive to see myself through the eyes of those who love me, as the beautiful creature they honestly believe I can be.
I will strike at the fears within me until they subside or I am unable to strike further.
I will learn that it's okay to trust other people again.
I will be more discerning in who I let into that circle.
I will not let myself be broken as I have before.
I will knit twenty more scarves for the homeless than I did last year.
I will clean my car out at least once a week.
I will continue to keep my room clean, believing that an uncluttered room makes for less emotional and mental clutter in my life.
I will remember who I wanted to be and keep her close to home, but I will not forget the people I have been or what I have learned.
I will keep moving forward with only glances back.
I will live and love in the present moment earnestly and deeply.
I will forgive those I have not been able to before now.
I will keep my established friendships and forge new ones, nurturing each to the best of my ability.
I will return fucking emails for crying out loud. And messages.
I will remember to look at the stars every night and realize that, no matter how tiny I am, I am a part of something bigger.
I will not mute the music from the waters and winds and wrens.
I will try. I will try until I make it.
I will keep volunteering.
I will celebrate living rather than merely existing.
I will work on my fears of rejection.
I will find a relationship where I am valued at what I am worth, not at what my mate's momentary whims are.
I will not settle for less all the time. That includes stuff coming from me.
I will learn to believe that it's okay to cry.
I will fix my knee and become a Real Live Athlete again.
I will camp and kayak and swim and play and be ACTIVE.
I will continue to make each inmate feel special and loved, not forgetting that I believe strongly in a higher standard of humanitarianism and ethics and am practicing what I believe by doing so.
I will publish a book or at least submit a final draft.
I will hug more often.
I will write every day, even if terrible things have happened the day before.
I will stop listening to Mariah Carey in my fucking headphones. What the fuck?!? How did this get on my playlist? /randomness
I will read fifty books this year in completion and keep a list somewhere to keep track of my progress.
I will actually get out of the house to go to shows and hang with friends.
I will have parties. Especially crafty ones, hehehe.
I will poster inspirational quotes and phrases all over town at least once a month.
I will keep secretly giving roadkill animals the proper funerals they deserve to feel falsely as though I were compensating their pain for our convenience.
I will pay off at least half the remaining balance on my car (whew! lofty goals!)
I will stop worrying so much about things I have no control over.

I will keep adding to this list and accomplish at LEAST half by my twenty fifth birthday... HOLY SHIT! I'M TWENTY FOUR! FUCK I'm old. Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

/insanity

Just kidding guys. Fuck me I love birthdays. Aren't you all so glad I'm a part of the world? =3 I'm so very grateful I did not succeed in killing myself when I was all angsty teenish.

~The Lover Lost

On the way home the other night, I tried to imagine what it would be like to try to describe what it was like to love you, to be in love with you, to be surrounded by and completely immersed in the World apart from the rest of the world that was ours. All I could do was white knuckle the steering wheel and try not to picture Her face. Sigur Ros Ambience swirled and thumped in the air while I read you my e.e. cummings as your strapping, cut figure blanketed my body and your cold lips kissed my brow, my collarbone, my heart. Stars fell and worlds imploded when your tongue caressed mine. You sank into my soul, but I never forgot Tomorrow was coming.

~ The Abuser

It was the way your hands slid into my hair around my ears and how you cradled my head in your hands while pressing your lips against mine that made me forgive the day before when your touch was far from kind. You were stars, stickers and strychnine. You were my joy, my comfort, my oppressor, my punishment, my everything, and isn't that what you always wanted to be? We were poetry and promises emptier than our flashy, fanciful words. You left your mark, but I survived you, and lived to survive again.

~ The Unlikely Fling

If he knew, it would Fuck Up his world, despite that we weren't together, despite the changed rules, it would Blow his fucking Mind. More me convincing myself it was the right thing to do than anything. More me deciding I would make it work with you than looking at the compatibility rates, than looking at how much I liked you. All I saw was how much you liked me, and I thought that was enough. Still, the warmth of your lips, hovering in wait, finally acting on the confidence you'd built and caressing me down made me happy I'd made the wrong decision again.

~ The Deceived and the Deceiver

He wouldn't let me fuck him. He pinned my hips, my shoulders, held my hands down and stared into my eyes until I stopped squirming. He wordlessly kissed me, softly, slowly, and held me until I was okay. I thought it was a seed of love at work I was seeing.

Later I discovered it was only erectile dysfunction.

~ The Broken Vase

I let him kiss me because I knew how much it would mean to him if I did, though I did not love him, though I did not want him. I wanted to want him. I loved the idea of loving him. And I tried to make those moments as special for me as I could see in his eyes that they were for him. If I had known the pain to come from my departure, I would have restrained my libido and your lips. I'm sorry.

~ The Drunk Date

A flurry of tongue and teeth, that's pretty much all I remember, not surprising, considering how drunk I was. Gave a new, literal meaning to the term Eating Face. When I asked him what had given him the nerve to do such a thing, he said, "Because you wanted me to." I wonder if I did? He thought he was a sex god. I guess that means I debunked Min.

~ The Conquest

I waited as long as I felt I could wait before I would surely explode. It was carefully calculated, cautiously plotted, all variables were taken into account before I proceeded in a manner that would ensure success. It's why I moved so fast when you said you wished you had the guts to kiss me. I was prepared in a way you underestimated the entire course of the relationship. I suppose I showed you that in the long run, eh? That night of first kisses and sticky pants behind dumpsters and under brilliant stars is forever at the top of my Conquest List. In those heated rolling around in the dewy grass licking nipping at each other giggling falling all over moments, I really did love you.

~ The Future Preacher

I think I felt special because everyone wanted you but I was the one who had you. I wish I'd realized I didn't want you for any other reason long before I did. Still, the way you pounced from your seat to mine was too adorable. I remember thinking, Put your hand up my goddamned shirt already! If only I'd have known what was to come, I wouldn't have given you the time of day, much less Make Out Time. You always wondered when I knew I had you, and I never told. It was when you lightly touched my leg during that song and gave me the meaningful look.

~ The Dumb Eye Candy

I don't even remember the first time we kissed, but I do remember you were good at it, and that the last time I saw you, I slapped your ass, thanked you for the great makeout, smooched your cheek and waltzed off to my car amidst your befuddled laughter. Sorry I didn't return all those calls. I suppose that makes me an asshole.

~ The Young Buck

You didn't take the hint at first. When a girl is straddling you, has her head lilted to the side, flutters her lashes and asks coyly what you think about kissing on the first date, the correct response is Not Verbal. You were almost more naive than I am. He whispers I love that you're so smart, that's so hot and gives me a hickey.

~ The Artist

Rain slickens the evergreen world around us and I want to tell you I love you because you're warm and I'm wrapped in your arms and if we were any closer we'd be on the other side of each other. Pushing my hair back with your hands and massaging my tongue with yours and our bodies vibrate and shiver in this shared, unrepeatable act. You took me for a muse in human form and creativity flowed in your veins when I was there. Last I heard you'd stopped painting. You told a friend it wasn't the same without me. I wondered if it was a ploy, but I sent you an anonymous postcard anyway.

That kiss healed something dark and troubled within me, and I owed you for that.

~ The Sensitive Singer

It takes him forty five minutes to work up the nerve. He picks things up and sets them down. He rearranges. He folds and unfolds fingers. He straightens. I'm trying not to let my inner smile show outwardly. I feel like a cat waiting for the mouse to roll onto it's back in surrender to the Obvious Solution. The delicate placement of his hand on mine as I went to leave foretold of the gentle and lithe kiss that came after. The kisses in places no one had kissed me before, or has kissed me since... how perceptive of you. And oh, how I miss that perceptiveness from time to time when the nights are lonely and the dogs are howling and the moon is hidden behind clouds like that first time.

~ The Emo Kid

Our osculation a series of pecks and nibbles more than anything, pinning me and repeating that you liked me until my eyes spilled tears of belief made my heart swell with satisfaction and an aching to be closer. I really don't know how you always leave me wanting moremoremore. If I could figure it out, I'd bottle it up and sell a thousand in the first hour of production.

~ The Best Friend

Maybe we'd still be friends if I hadn't thrown coffee in your face, I don't know. We'd almost certainly still be friends if you hadn't crossed the bounds I had just laid out and stolen a kiss. I know. It was in desperation. It was in the high hopes that you'd show me how much you liked me and I'd suddenly realize I liked you the same way I had years before. It was frustration at not having what I told you you would someday wish you had, back when we were silly children. As though we'd grown up by then. I still wish I'd handled it differently. Of all the times I dreamed of kissing you, I never imagined it would be in such a way, when I was already in a relationship with someone else.

Thanks for fucking up my I've Never Cheated track record.

So it begins.

A new chapter in the ongoing saga of my life.

This one will be slightly different. This one will be mostly me telling stories with the occasional rant. This one will be me working on my writing skills, as always, never editting what I've written in an effort to force myself to be more cognisant, to hone my talents, to sharpen and better define my gifts.

I welcome all feedback. All comments. Commentary. Criticisms, especially constructive ones. See: "This Sucks" versus "If you had gone into more detail on her feelings while she was alone on the beach, I think it would have been a more emotive entry." Please strive for the latter of the two. Observances. Questions. Scathingly dark predictions. You know, just, whatever you have to say, post reading the entry.

More than that, I would *love* feedback. Love. I will doubtlessly comment in afterthought myself.

Some of these stories will be my own. Some of them will belong to others. All of them will be told in the manner which makes the most sense to me, in the hopes of receiving commentary on how well or poorly I am doing. Some may even end up in my future books, or at least be referenced in them. This is where my ideas will form. This is where I will contain the thousand clever lines unread on clever napkins that haunt my brain and dance round my soul.

As always, thank you for reading. I appreciate you more than you will likely ever realize.

And then...