Why be happy when you could be normal?

why, indeed.


Coming back to this.

Touch

My body is abandoned.

His touch is selfish.
-"Kiss my neck"

I do as he asks. I always finish. But finishing isn't the important part. An empty orgasm is worse than no orgasm.

The last one would finish as soon as he touched me.

I miss what it was like to have a lover. To truly lose control. To have my mind wiped of any an all thought, to have my body tense and shaking. Where the slightest touch brought even the hair on my body to ecstasy.

My body is abandoned. By them and by me.

I let my breasts fall. I have rolls in places that should be smooth and flat. I probably am carrying around cancer in my lungs from the cigarettes I smoke.

In my daydreams I imagine disconnecting from everyone, and reappearing five years later, as a graceful woman, a demure goddess, the object of admiration, an air of mystery, two words: sophisticated, together.

I don't see a way out of this bed with no sheet, this room with empty food cartons, this face with over-picked scabs.

"What happened to your face?" my sisters asked me, just yesterday. "Are you on your period? I've never seen you so broken out."

"I just got off it," I lied. I got off it a few weeks ago. I've just reopened every scab every day because it's easier to be ugly now than try to be pretty.

Breaking.

I'm not even able to go insane correctly. I can't fall into a proper depression, one that ends with a mental institution. I lack the dare. I stare at the tiny, pearly beads of iridescent green Irish Spring body wash on my squeegie. I've locked myself in the bathroom because taking a bath constitutes a normal activity and my bf will let me be alone for a while. So I stare at the squeegie, with the green Irish spring iridescent beads, on black, and I want to stare at it for a very long time. But instead I rub the beads into the black squeegie and I start to wash my arm. As I'm washing it, I'm loathing myself because I can't even break down properly, and here I am washing my arm, like a normal person, when in fact I know I"m falling apart.

If only I could fall apart properly, then I wouldn't be such a fucking mess. But instead, I fall apart repressed, which is probably more fucked up than anything.

But I have to go. I hear him on the stairs.

Quick Question:

What's worse? Having a boyfriend that refuses to understand what you are going through, and forces you out into the daylight, and forces you to visit your family and friends, which actually makes you feel better for a small time..

or

Having a boyfriend that understands, and lets you lie in bed for a week, or weeks, or a month, doing nothing, watching movie after movie, staring at tiny beads on your squeegie?


I can't decide if he's helping or hurting me. Now it's time to go outside.

So it's Mardi Gras.

Everyone knows how much I love this time of year. not very.

I have to work through most of the parades, which go on right by my house. My work is also right by my house. I feel like such a grumpy old lady lately. I seem to hate everything.

Maybe I should make a list of things I still love:

1. When someone makes me really smile. Not a fake smile. A customer made me really smile yesterday at work and I could feel every muscle in my face relaxing, and my mood changing. That's not something you can fake, but it doesn't happen much for me anymore. I go around with this sour lemon lip.

2. Writing. I still love writing. I still love thinking about writing, editing in my head, changing, thinking about other people's writing, writing. I really am missing out not going for an editing job. I think once I"m out of school after this semester I'll no longer have to turn in assignments which will mean I'll be more willing to send in my work for publishing.

3. Sometimes I love music. A song here or there.

4. Clothes.

Some things I'm doing from now on.

Keeping in touch with friends. Since Theron died, I've realized how horrible I am at keeping in touch (I mean real touch, not just call once every three months or so) with my other friends. I have three very good friends that I'm going to do everything I can to talk to once a week at least. One is Dilek, one is Emily, one is Chris Landry.

I'm also calling my sisters more. I don't talk to them on the phone much, but that's changing. I called the younger one last night.

Also going to yoga, pilates and zumba classes during the week.

The Stranger by Camus

I rereread The Stranger and I get it now. What perfect perfect words.


Only took me three times.

Waterfalls.

                  “Waterfalls”

     Ron is 31 years old and he is going to die. There will be flowers and food and black and white snapshots, tears; and I will be there with a poem and some words that won’t matter to anyone but me.  I can tell them I know how he likes his sandwich. Roast beef, mayo and lettuce.  Should I say he likes white women and noses?  I can tell them that he loved rock and Goth and wrote poetry.  I can say sweet things and no one will listen because he was the one who listened. Listened and---- there is a song inside me that sings when I’m around him. It starts off as a slow melody and violently peaks and dips and hugs the curves of the scales that play. Hear that Crescendo!  From time to time it finds its way off of the page and leaps and bounds happily into the memories that are ours. Sometimes it dips so low that it hurts me in deep places. It is a song for soul mates, and Ron is mine.

   When I was 17 I saw his feet pass by 11 times. I counted. They were in shoes that were black and red and had lighting strikes caught in plastic and rubber. I never thought to look up, only wondered at the shoes that passed back and forth in front of me. I wondered if the owner was aware that his Docs were incredibly cool. They looked like shoes that knew they were cool.  Once upon a time they stopped moving, and I looked up. I found myself. I knew his fears were my fears and I wrote them in blood on my heart.

   Then it was our time to bleed.  His mother was gone, and his father was drinking; his father was crashing; his father was screaming and twisting and sleeping on the street. His father was raping and cursing and crying out to God to save him from himself. His father was gone, so quietly that I never saw the storm at my back. Then my father was gone, and we were swept away in the downpour.

    Like a hurricane our lives changed, and we were holding onto each other on a raft in a great sea.  I couldn’t see and he couldn’t see. We stabbed each other in the dark at night when visitors came to feed off our rations. We held each other in the dark of night when we were the only ones left. We were empty and clung to each other, like callous shells stuck together by habit, not choice. I couldn’t love anymore and I had nothing to give. He was dead and I was dying. I was drowning and I thought we would hold each other’s heads under water until we both stopped breathing. I was all he had, and I tried to die.  He held my head out of the water and I woke up gasping for air in a bar with florescent lights aglow and naked men’s smiles that I thought meant ESCAPE. They really were Death. We held hands and I sobbed and he put me on a plane and I left the man who saved me.

   When I came back I learned of his suffering. The suffering he did without me. I learned about the drug raids and the murder and the life he had to live. I learned about the hospitals and the kidney failure and the four tubes they drilled in his neck to make him live. He told me about the white girls who popped pills and sucked his dick so he could die.  He told me about his deaths; there were two of them.  One when I left and one when he realized what he had become without me.  I cried and died and then it was time to live. But there was a day when we drove in the car and we passed a field of wildflowers. He told me where to find him in heaven.

    “How will I know where to look for you, Ron?”

    “I’ll be in a cave like a hermit; a wise hermit, behind a waterfall.”

    “What if I can’t find you?” He smiled and held my chin.

    “I know where you will be, under the willow tree, my sweet angel.”

   I felt then for the first time that nothing lasts. Then the years passed and he watched and I grew and I flew and just yesterday he finally told me I was safe.  And then there is today. And today is spinal taps and tubes in his throat and not being able to walk ever again. “1 in 3 chance” the text messages say and I pause and wait and try to think what to say but there is nothing to say, nothing to say.

     “I’ll bring you burritos” I say,

    “And sugar-free cookies?” he adds.

   Of course love. Of course.  And I’ll call your sister who threatened my life and who said I’m no sister of yours, because it’s hard to understand what it means to have a soul mate. But because I can’t be the only one to love him, I’ll call. Onions of layers of years of love, and only me to give them. I’ll peel them back. I’ll find the center, I’ll let you bite. I’ll give you what I have to give and it won’t be enough. There is not enough time. And we pray for vibrancy but the world is now dull and we live in slowed heartbeats of moments in color. Our hands touch and the nurse turns away from the black and white and we become something else behind her back; something floating and colorless.  We sail and dance and I kiss him goodbye. It is silent and bright outside and I must go on.  One day it will be time to search for caves beyond waterfalls, but not today.

   And the simple truth is: I have lived because of Ron. I have lived because of him.