Aye. Well said Mr Kerouac.

immobilized

Between turning 33 (somehow more devastating than any other birthdays of this, my third decade, or any birthday, really), the demise of my constant (Siena, the cafe, that place I both loathe and love), and awakening from the stupor that was the love of my lifetime (a devastation in so so so many ways), a part of me, an unrecognizable new part of me (you might say something that could be defined as "adult") has decided that enough is enough.

The procrastination, the bullshit, the rut, the laziness justified with a mountain of excuses, the rise of dramageddon, the endless array of disliked characters in wait-til-you-hear-this! stories, the broken promises, the desires unfulfilled and ignored, the old constant negativity and whining, the dodging of people that had previously pleased me somehow back then, the not doing what I really want to be doing and instead feeling constantly gripped by guilt and concern that I missed the important phone call, message, opportunity to be a good daughter, sister, best friend, friend, lover, writing partner, employee, coworker, acquaintance, etc.

I'm not sure exactly when it all got to be too much. I look back on the last six months and I see how stifled I've been feeling, how suffocated and submerged life has become and I know I have no one to blame but myself. I want to do it all and I want to have it all and ironically, I end up with little scraps and remnants of nothing, piles of sand that disappear from my hands so quickly. At some point, I lost the focus I had, the focus that gave me discipline and a map to follow. In trying to figure out what the new approach to this unexpected life should be, I have dabbled in so many things and succeeded at none and constantly feel overwhelmed.

Last year in January, I did something which seemed to many a strange and horrific thing, but as I look back on the cleanse (also known as the lemonade diet)--in which I spent twenty one days free from the confines of consuming solid food, which led me to be unable to frolic about with most people I know, who gather around food and drink like they must have centuries ago, just to be together and feast, espousing all theories and ideas well into the night--I realize it gave me some focus outside of school or work that I had never experienced before.

I enjoyed that time for so many reasons, despite the obvious setbacks (my life and thoughts largely revolve around food), mostly because it was a giant pulling of the brake on my constant busyness. Without food as a agent in that machinery of mine, I had to alter how and when and who I did things with. I toy now with doing the cleanse not just for the health benefits (I know it's regarded as a silly quick fix diet heralded by celebrities, but people have been fasting for various reasons for a very long time), but to enjoy the serenity that comes from not being able to go anywhere or do anything that revolved around food or drinks (90% of my outings with friends, I'd say).

The benefits I experienced were plentiful: I quit smoking for a while, I started doing yoga on a daily basis, I began knitting and crafting things again; not to mention my liver from the future tried to get me sainted in gratitude. Also, I realized that my friends, my real friends were the ones who didn't care that I was doing some kooky fast and just wanted to spend time with me. Heck, even Walter was begging me to join him at the bar on the first day of breaking the fast, when I was only allowed to drink juice, I sipped on grapefruit juice until the bar closed and he seemed very happy to see me after so long.

To me the fast was like pressing a reset button. I could start anew on eating a vegan/vegetarian diet (which I've since become a vegetarian-at-large), I could commit to exercising via daily yoga (which, admittedly didn't last long with my crazy schedule), and most importantly, I managed to break that nasty smoking habit (at least for six months or so).

All I know is that right now, something has got to give or improve vastly in my life. I am tired of peeling myself out of bed every morning (perhaps the bed exchange is partly to blame), relying on my precious coffee to just be normal and not a giant grouch, feeling like everyone else is enjoying life and I'm stuck in the same old place. I am tired of washing away my woes or perceived woes in a glass of beer and getting high just to get fake happy. I am tired of feeling disconnected. I am sad that it seems like I never accomplish anything, yet I'm always busy. If it's my own damn fault I'm disappointed in life, then I need to try something else in the search for satisfaction.

Oh my!

encounters with yesterday's news:

Lifting the veil of hibernation has led to some eye opening perspective about the men in my life last year. The fire has remained on my periphery for whatever reason (he needs bodies to fill spaces sometimes and he knows how to ply me into a yes, I suspect is all it is) and this week I realized it has been a year, a whole entire year since I was first aware that there was some attraction between us. Whatever that attraction was based on (my surprising nature, a good hair day, a beautiful Spring afternoon) has long since expired, but for some reason we are bound to each other. Sometimes I wonder if it is to prove that our initial responses to each were genuine and not just a desire to be with someone.

Seeing him again, last week, last month, three months ago, four months ago, etc, there has been no residual wonder or hope for him; I had been so fully crushed in his wake, I could not resurrect my earnest affections. Imagine my horror then, when my good friend and often drunken truth teller, Walter, joined me for one of the fire's many events requiring bodies and began informing everyone around us and harassing me that the only reason I was there was because I still wanted him.

And it's odd, but I haven't questioned the fire and the light interactions we have, the sense of obligation I feel to filling up the open space in his events, or wondered about it all. I decided at some point that he had not been unkind to me during that awkward phase between men and women when they are first getting to know each other and wonder what might be. I also enjoyed his cheerful serenity, his hobbies and habits and his general sense of appreciation of me and the other bodies I brought with me over this past year. I am understanding that it is rare to meet people I actually like and admire, so I found it odd to discard him and his invitations simply from the spite of being overlooked.

I noticed, in addition to introducing me to people, that at one point early on after I arrived, he was raising eyebrows with some guy and looking at me (which I assume is guy code for are you seeing this girl?), he also seemed to be pushing this agenda he's pushed before with giving his friend information about me (while in the bathroom of all places) to get a conversation started between us, because his friend is interested in me. It gave me some small sense of pleasure that even though he is girlfriended, he finds me charming enough to get something going with his friends. It also made me realize that perhaps I was there for the wrong reason and I need to admit it's not my scene.

So eventually, that night, I had to admit that Walter's drunken assessment wasn't completely wrong. Except, for the first time in my adult life, I wasn't going to sit around and be mopey about not having what I want, because I know nothing is going to happen between us and I accept that. I wasn't allowing that attraction to govern me.

The same could not be said for the magnetic disc. I did nothing but torture myself about him, hating the torturing, but unable to stop it and this week I couldn't help myself, I opened up that wound and poured lye into it. I can't quite tell yet, but I think it helped. Now I have an idea what he was doing and saying to the people around him. And now I understand that it wasn't just me who wouldn't let go.

She was getting to that drunken point where her speech was slurring and I asked her about him. I could tell she had been bracing herself for it. Hell, I think they've all been bracing themselves for it, and interestingly enough, every time I ask them, the elephant in the room disappears in smoke and we are able to fully enjoy each other's company. That's part of what he did to me. He created an entire scenario that disrupted my friendships with people and convinced them of something that put distance and awkwardness in the space between us.

I knew something had happened, I could feel it, it was so frustrating, people coddling me, people acting like I was obsessed or stalking him, people watching me to see what I would do. I felt the hush of the bar every time I came in and he happened to already be there. It was maddening to me that people who had previously been so jovial treated me like it was a chore to speak to me.

I tried to stay away. The more that time passed between what happened and Fall made things better but I could still sense the tension of it, not as much as before, where sometimes, no matter how much I drank I could not get drunk or shake the feeling that I was experiencing a dramarama of high school lunchroom levels, complete with racing heartbeats, nervous and guilty behaviors and awkward eye contact and monologues on unfairness.

I was guilty, but not of much. I mean, on the surface, not much actually happened between us to cause the sort of scandal it seemed I was facing each time I walked in there. We kissed a couple times. We hung out once. Big fucking deal.

According to the sloshed informant, little did I know that he lied to me out of distress because he didn't want to date me, so he made up a story about being in love with his girlfriend back home and proceeded to insist we be friends and that he hoped it wouldn't be weird for me to continue to go to the bar--to which I replied, not at all and took my hands, dirty and grimy from the handling of men, excavating the good ones from deep mines only to find them flawed and not for me and I let it go.

So why then did this man (who recently turned 30) proceed to whisper in the ears of anyone who would listen that I was chasing him still? Because I texted him a couple times after? Because I still went to my bar, the place I'd been frequenting on a weekly to bi-weekly basis three years before his arrival? Because I didn't ignore him every time he passed me? Because I still obviously really liked him?

I did all of those things with the same logic I applied to the fire. I realized it was rare that I liked someone and if he was willing to remain on friendly terms with me (in fact, he was the one who proposed so and insisted on it) then why wouldn't I continue to enjoy his company? It would be so much easier if being romantically attracted to someone was as easy to turn off as a light switch. I am getting better at dismantling those feelings than I used to be. It requires the passing of time, which slowly erodes the beaches of my memory of things that I associate with them, each discarded shell removed.

I didn't have the luxury of time in this case. The other thing I didn't have was a clear idea of whether or not he was not interested in me. He may have informed all of his buddies that I was chasing him, but he certainly never ran away, sometimes he initiated conversations with me, and once, when he was so drunk that he doesn't remember seeing me, he tried to kiss me on the lips. So even though half the times I encountered him he could be a real dick, the other times he exhibited a sparkling kindness that I wanted to believe meant something and I believed that lie for a while, until I realized I was getting carried away and then I wouldn't go back there for a while until I felt strong enough to ignore him again, but he always managed to not be ignored. He didn't want to be ignored. He may have pretended to everyone that I was always staring at him, but to see my eyes, he had to be looking for them.

Once I knew he had a girlfriend--a fact I suspected long before I got confirmation of it, because everyone was tiptoeing around me like I was going to fly off the handle if I knew he had a girlfriend; which I never did--I let that possibility go, that there was something between us drawing us to each other, that he felt it too. Maybe he felt nothing but my clamoring, but my sense and intuition tell me that he had some interest in me, even when he was feigning that he did not.

Even asking her, this girl, the sloshed, slurring friend of his, acquaintance of mine, I knew I was going to be filling the role I surmised he'd scripted for me. I had to know. Hopefully one day I can get by without knowing, I can get along without wondering, I can just trust that what I feel is true and none of it really matters anyway. But for now, it is good to know that I wasn't completely crazy, and he was an immature idiot. And truly, this is just another example of why I am glad nothing actually happened between us.

The brick road...

the welt

it sits on me like a burn, sometimes I poke at the strange hull that is my skin's way of throwing up a tent over a hole in the ground to protect it from infection.

I know I shouldn't look anymore, and I look. I look for so many reasons. Sometimes it is, I wonder if he doing well? then it might be, I wonder if his photo has changed, next I might say, I want to see the man and the woman that fucked me up emotionally for too long and face them and say to their likeness, you didn't win. Sometimes I am scared that if she is gone from the picture he might come back to me.

I looked today and it was the first time I really spoke aloud, screamed at the screen, said mean, terrible, horrible things that no one would say unless provoked or angry, because sometimes I think it's bad to be angry. I am always trying to be nice that when I am mean, on purpose, intentionally nasty, it seems so harsh.

I hate that he still has that effect on me, that he can still incite my passion and rage and yet it has been over a year. I hate that I can't stop thinking about that image. For some reason the other one didn't enrage me, because he looked different, not the same, some face I had never seen before. This one, the newer one, she was ignoring him, he was holding a drink and the only one looking at the camera and he had those same beady eyes of terror, the tragic yoke of "I was dragged here by the woman I'm standing next to against my own desire to sit at home and get high and watch tv on the couch the way I do night after night."

This one is so familiar to me, the sight of him that way, that it was like I instantly relived all those moments of his behaving that way, like a fucking petulant child; I screamed out loud at the image. And I know this sounds fucked up, but in a way I was kind of mad at him for doing that again with some other girl he left me (not just any me, but me!) for. Because if he left me, it had better been worth it, and that face told me it wasn't worth it for him anymore. He was now doing to her what he did to me. And he pretended it was all my inducing, causing in him, that I forced him to be that way.

I had hoped that he was right and that by leaving me, he could be free and find what he really needed. That face showed me the discovery that he is the commonality and maybe I was right and in the right about so many things we argued over. But it is no victory if he is miserable.

thanks to Patty:

I discovered a very thick cord of my mental state of mind on a subconscious level. I will try to explain it as best I can.

Essentially, my identity was wrapped up in my mother's constant anguish (never a sadder Job has one met) and I began to try to help her carry that burden, though I doubt it even felt like I was there, it was so big, and I began to view the world as a threat, every single thing a potential disaster, trusting nothing and no one, and hiding.

I hid in books. I hid my personality. I was always a weirdo. I used to like to wear two different earrings until someone in my family made fun of me for that. I shrank myself down to a pixel and then wore the shell of my mother's anguish like a tortoise settles into it's house. It felt like that, a heavy shell, a burdensome clunking thing that I wanted so desperately not to wear but I had no idea how to get out of it once it was on me.

I went through my world oblivious for a long time.

I was a jerk. I threw emotional grenades at my mother and brothers constantly and tried to break down the cheerful love I had. It is probably hard to explain that even though I knew what I was doing was wrong, I couldn't stop doing it. I had this overwhelming urge to constantly test the people around me, forcing them to be reduced to walking on eggshells when I entered the room. I hated that in order to prove that everyone loved me I had to be mean to them and see if they stayed.

I don't want to blame her because it's not her fault that I turned out that way. She didn't know how to stop it either. And she was so young.

Interestingly enough, I didn't develop this at a younger age, because I was always a bit carefree and caught up in my own thoughts and, what people describe about me now: chill. I let things slide, I was always a willing volunteer, I constantly showed my affection and was very happy to be myself in general. The five of us squished in there, sometimes I just can't fathom how we didn't kill each other, all angry about the anguish and pissed that we were poor, it sometimes was very good not to be home at all.

This tortoise shell of anger came after I allowed myself to let my studies at DePaul lapse to the point that I--an honor roll student consistently in the Top 10 or 20 of my high school--I flunked out of college. Part of me was absolutely aware that the two and a half months in which I pretended to go to school I was fucking up, but I was so disheartened by an F on an essay I wrote in English Composition, an essay in which I essentially showed off in the most cocky way I could that I was not just a good writer, but a great writer.

When I look at it now, I can see how ridiculous it is that I wrote that as a first essay for a class. My teacher was harsh in giving me an F, but not unreasonable for doing so. I missed the point of the assignment and I wasn't in Fiction class. But for those nine weeks after, my brain was in shut down mode and I felt stuck in only being able to lie the lie. One of the reasons I'm so honest now is that life smacking bout with dishonesty. If I had just sucked it up and told the truth, I could have not flunked out of school and withdrawn instead, and saved myself the cost of the classes.

I knew I was not very good at being in college, from the very beginning, I was the weirdo that no one got. I didn't even have a personality, I was like a walking zombie. Sometimes it was like we were speaking two different languages and I learned not to open my mouth and that not saying anything was better. So the flunking out was the culmination of having spent the first year of the thing I had been waiting for my entire life to do, that my mom had been waiting for my entire life to have me do, and finding out that it was a huge fucking disappointment.

This was the first time I ever fucked up something big. I had a few things happen that were similar but much less minor in their impact. Everyone else in my family had experienced some horrendous bouts of consequences from bad decisions, except me. I was Little Miss Perfect. I had values. I believed in things. Eventually this would be one of the more noxious behaviors venting out of the tortoise shell. Back then I just was a good girl. It was like my job and I was really good at it. So when I flunked out of school it leveled the emotional playing ground and suddenly I was paranoid and uncertain and they bullied me and the defense I had to use to get by was that tortoise shell. It was like a shield and a sword.

The tortoise shell got stuck at some point in my relationship with him, which I feel terrible about, that he endured such an endless array of my bullshit with such good spirits. As a kid, being gangly and awkward was something I got used to, but suddenly being an "adult," I always felt big and in the way. I gained a lot of weight after high school and felt so uncomfortable in this new body. I was extremely insecure and felt so ugly. Yet he still loved me. Then the abyss happened and created an emotional chasm too wide for me to cross. So we stayed for what we had and I hated myself for the abyss. I sometimes wonder if we met now if we'd be able to even be in a relationship. Probably not. And that is okay with me. I used to really regret that choice but I think it was for the best. I hope he is happier for it, too.

Then I fucked up that relationship to the point of you'd have to be crazy or really love me to ever talk to me again. I had no idea how to do it, and I did it very badly. I was stumbling through the dark trying to find a way out is how I think of it, and when a door opened underneath me, I fell. It was exactly what I needed. I didn't realize I had been looking for it until it happened, but I needed someone to teach me how to relax and be cool as an adult and that's what he was for me. He was someone I both admired and secretly disdained, for his values were not as tidy as mine were and they didn't line up next to mine, but I was so thirsty for what he said that it didn't matter what he did.

Added to that was a crazy plan to visit Europe for three weeks. The day after I moved out, I was on a plane to Rome. I decided to go on a whim; one day six months or so earlier when my friend offered I join her there. The biggest trip I took prior, was to Disneyworld with someone else's family. To go to Europe, I had to get a passport, buy rail tickets, consider what I might do there and relish in the fact that I was going to spend five days in Paris, a place that I always felt some weird affinity for without any sort of good reason. And in Paris, and Europe, really, I saw in the people the image and personality I had been vying for all those years, but unsure about enacting. I saw a refined sophistication that I felt I was too beneath to practice, a style of dress I immediately felt at home with but again, thought I was not good enough to be wearing nice clothes; and the manners, a real honest to goodness conscientiousness for their fellow man.

Basically I learned that I don't have an American sensibility, I don't have a particular fondness for rampant consumerism, widespread consumption of plastic in all its forms; and garbage, I really hate garbage. And of course, it's not that Europeans have it totally perfect and no one ever litters, but they at least try and their trying makes more sense to me. It's been nearly ten years since I went and they had recycling stations on many street corners in Paris with holes that only fits the product being recycled, instead of a giant garbage bin with a wide mouthed lid and some blue recycling logo. But it's not just that they do recycling better, the people actually want to recycle, it's part of their lifestyle, it's part of them being an older country than us and having to resort to clever ways to rid the small space of excessive trash.

And, I purposefully didn't wear sneakers the entire time I was in Europe. I left them at home. I took shoes I hadn't worn before, they got broken in on my trip, they were black dressier shoes for me and I got numerous blisters and felt so much discomfort, but when I got there I realized that no one knew I was American until I opened my mouth. And that made me very proud. That affirmed something in me that began to break up the tortoise shell.

I also decided to go back to school. It became the kind of point that I just couldn't argue anymore without sounding ridiculous. I didn't believe in matriculation. Higher education wasn't for me. I don't need school to do what I want. I can't tell you how many times I said those exact phrases and how glad I am that everyone pestered me so much into going to school which was one of the most valuable, self-validating, life-changing experiences for me. You'd think I'd remember what exactly it was that gave me the permission to say I wanted to go to school more than anything. Maybe it was that place, where I learned so much about speaking your desires and having them come true but first you have to say them. They certainly opened a door under me that I fell in and learned how to conduct myself as a human being in a world of six billion human beings. I lost my obliviousness and was able to create huge cracks in the tortoise shell, but it wasn't enough.

It was him, the love of my lifetime, the burnham, that helped me take off that shell, and loved the shriveled and atrophied parts of me just as much as the personality I purported to own, which I had not finished melding against myself, which later he was able to peel up sometimes and expose me and I picked up the shell when I needed it. I was done wearing it in some areas of my life but it still functioned and I still used it as a defense.

Sometimes I imagine that girl I used to be and it's so painful. I just think about her and feel so bad that I was like that and was so unhappy and made other people around me miserable. Sometimes I think about how I sought out approval, constantly baiting everyone around me. Ugh. I hate that girl. And I'm so glad I'm not her anymore.

This last year has really been the cementing of my self, a full acceptance of who I am and why I am with no reservations, concerns or fears. And it has been a very good year. The tortoise shell is so broken I can barely use it, and rarely do.

Gary does wood

Fwd: no subject

:)

cheer up, honey, I hope you can...there is something wrong with me

This is what I have to remember:

My life is a house of cards. It takes nothing to upend me. I have nothing stable, nothing solid, nothing that I cannot throw away at a moment's notice. The only thing I have is my self, which I earned over a period of fifteen years in which I trampled through all that I had just to get to this empty space. I killed love at every turn and fucked up every relationship I had, romantic, friendly, family, nothing was sacred and nothing was left unsaid or alone.

In my exploration, my search to find my self, I let many things happen to me that I know I would never let happen to me if those same things approached me now. I'd be able to say no, thanks and walk away instead of trying to puzzle over and figure things out. I thought that I had managed to muster a fairly accurate divining rod for the people I came across.

Sometimes I am wrong and I think I know what I'm getting into, I give people too much credit and hope so hard for the best and then I understand that it is just an upgrade from where I was, the paper is prettier, the ribbons finer, the potential for loveliness so great that I overlook things that I finally see later, when it is much too late.

I want to have the good things that other people have, the joy, the pleasure, the stability that gives them freedom. I know I have felt it, I know I have faked it, but I am tired of waiting for it or getting half of what I need. They leave me constantly thirsty, desperate for approval, aching for satisfaction. I get joy from life, the nests in the naked trees, the bats swooping overhead, the feel of fabric against my skin, but it is with them that I cannot find pleasure. Lately I have suffered from a string of disappointments they imposed on me, tired of my standards and sick of my demands.

Should I bend or break? that is all I wonder.

Moreover

drawn and quartered

I want to forget him. I want the vapors of my infatuation to fade and each time I see him again, days, weeks, months pass and there it is again, that same giddy drop in my stomach, I am launched back to the moment I first laid eyes on him and when his eyes landed on me. It is thrilling, that moment, and I don't even remember out of nostalgia, it is just a visceral pull of myself to a moment I nearly forgot until I see him again.

He was sitting across the bar. He was all smile. Seriously. His smile was huge and wide and bright in that dank place. His hands tried to hide the bigness of his smile, but they just shyly covered the mouth and not the smile. I felt the electricity of his stare before my eyes adjusted to the dimness of that place. I'd arrived and was being heartily greeted by my friends, all of whom were happy to see me, and his sister, who seemed most pleased to see me. When I turned to look at him, not because I was scanning the bar to see who was there, or to wonder at who this new man with the smile was, I was merely aware from my periphery that someone was staring at me very intently and very bemusedly. And our eyes met. And his smile walloped me from across that space, as if no one else was there and we were not thirty feet apart but standing nose to nose. His smile arrested me; I remember not being able to move for a moment, paralyzed in his gaze, like a deer standing in the woods suddenly startled by a foreign sound. And he was foreign, he was new, and it settled into my consciousness that he was different and interesting and interested in me. I was aware of it that fast, no questions, no concerns, just a knowledge, fast, quick and hard, that he was very much so interested in me. And that was how it began.

The people around us disarmed him and for a while he was just a figure in the shadows, known to everyone but me, can you imagine it? I didn't even know he was due to arrive, I had no idea she was his sister or he her brother. We began the task of drinking ourselves into happiness and slowly the room began to settle back into focus. Details of his presence emerged like messages in a bottle--first it was his laugh that he bellowed out like a foghorn, then it was his gestures, wild and unpredictable and then it was his words, a series of vague grunts at first, something that resembled language but not familiar until I realized it was because he was like her, he was like him (the crow) and that was when the beating of my heart began to ring out in my ears, because it was a show, it was a hunt and I was his prey.

I shrank in fear. I knew enough to know that I wasn't ready yet, I think I knew that instinctively and I began to panic, hoping he would talk to me and then worried about what I would say if he did, then hoping he wouldn't talk to me at all. I try to remember when they lifted the confusion, but it was a while before I realized who he was, that he wasn't just some new regular, some new guy, a visitor, but part of the web of people we knew there. I know it was a while, at least an hour before I knew, and his cajoling and laughter were like delicious pain, searing across my face from that distance, his eyes smiling at me then, his smile overt and unobscured by his hands and shining in my direction so brightly.

Once I realized who exactly he was (her brother), I felt some sense of relief, I stopped feeling adrift and grabbed onto something solid and was able to quiet the panic in my body, enjoy myself and even talk to him about nothing. And I assumed that intensity I felt was one sided as usual as I noticed his smile was wide for us all, not just me, and I let it go.

Later, I moved closer to him and finally began to make out the details of his face, the proportions of his body. He was very lean, with a swimmer's build and had a balding hairline and thin wire frame glasses. It wasn't his body I liked at first, but the way he moved it, almost as if he was a marionette and his limbs were being controlled from a separate place. He moved like a soccer player, light and smooth, but most of all with ease. The ease he wore was evident from the big grin plastered on his face all night. He was at peace with the world and he smiled like the buddha and I wanted to feel that, I admired it, I adored him for it and the thing I didn't realize is that he was only like that because of me.

Sure he was happy to be there, on vacation, visiting his sister, but most of all, as he would tell me later, he was completely startled by me and how beautiful he thought I was and how smart and amazing and pleasant he found my company. I see it now, and I know how he felt because he told me, but it never occurred to me then.

And the night fell away, his laughter echoed mine, his appreciation of me was almost unbelievable, I remember that I found it all heady and surreal. I don't remember if he left before me or if I left before him, all I remember is that when he wasn't there (having gone to the bathroom or outside for a smoke) the room fell flat and time felt stagnant and then crackled into aliveness when he returned.

At one point we found ourselves outside together and I told him how much his arrival must mean to his sister, for she'd been speaking of it for weeks and we had the kind of conversation that is deep and meaningful without being awkward or strange (something I found happened a lot to me; still does on occasion).

His gregariousness was infectious and soon the entire bar rested on his voice, alert to his noises, he became our forest. We sat close and talked; helped grade papers for my friend's fourth grade class and he made it a game with me and we played there for a while. I had often wished to have such fun, especially there, but never had before.

That was almost a year ago now. He has moved on, having loved two women he chose over me and I try to feel some sense of relief that I wasn't chosen because it would have most certainly been like being adrift at sea with no hope of survival. He would have drowned me and been a terrible person to have in my life; he is reckless, a drunkard, a foreigner here illegally and worse than all that, he is not well regarded by his friends anymore, or anyone anymore.

So why when I see him do I still search for that smile and why when he sees me does he give it to me? Not her, the girl he's with; not her, the prettier woman sitting next to me. Me. And why won't that feeling go away? Despite what I know, the ending that we had, the nothingness we share (we can barely muster up conversation together now) why do I still feel like I'm being pulled inside out and I don't care? I want it to stop, so I will continue to do as I have done, to avoid him and the web, to keep away.

Brain!

Dog

Conifer Garden