Thursday
14 December 2005

I like the idea that as a person becomes more and more aware of how the world around them works, how other people work, how their own fucking brain works, more and more complications arise, more challenges become apparent, and just when you begin to think you've got something figured out, an entire bustling civilization of creeping, crawling mechanisms of bewilderment reveals itself.

You just have to throw the fucking log and all the ants burrowing in and out of it into the fire.

And laugh.

And cry.

• × • × • × •

I've cried more in the last week than I have since nicholas and I fell out of love.

Of course, Saturday night's cracked out, down blanket on the sofa in the living room, watching movies about love, brushing my hair and high on xanax bawling doesn't really count for much; that kind of crying is pretty like an innocent 1940s starlet who gets herself addicted to valium and cries because she never realized how difficult—but fucking beautiful and amazing—the world could be. That sobbing jag feels fabulous and strong and real.

(is it real? is it strong? is it fabulous?)

• × • × • × •

And so I've entered a personal debate about whether I could give up ALL drugs. Until Christmas. Until New Year's. Whether I could and whether I SHOULD. Caffeine makes me work harder, and why would I voluntarily abandon that and be a less productive member of society? Because I want to become that without the aid of chemicals? Is it stupid to abstain from drugs like alcohol and caffeine? Because they are legal? Or is it stupid that I haven't given them up (yet today) just because idiotic circumstances and even more idiotic politicians have decided that they are "allowed"?

Sugar (and pretty much everything we ingest, in this modern age of colorings/flavorings/preservatives) has chemicals that hit my brain as well and alter my mood. Does it make my giddiness (or edginess) less real than if it were inspired by a person I respected smiling at me? Telling me they want to hang out with me? Telling me I'm fucking fabulous? Telling me

Drinking a lot of water and flushing the chemicals from my body and getting daily doses of activity like running through my cold neighborhood with rock and roll pumping through my veins and leaves falling down in tiny little tornadoes all around me—

that affects the chemicals that hit my brain. It makes it easier for me to feel satisfied, accomplished. Happy.

How is the happiness from pot less good than that? Through the side effects? Because sometimes it scares me? Because it may or may not speed the rate at which my throat and lungs are decaying? Running scares me. I'm a fucking klutz and I will have a shiny pink piece of skin at the base of my palm for the rest of my life because I trip on my own fucking feet and land sprawled across the asphalt with blood dripping onto it from my calf, from my hipbone, from my forearm, from the base of my palm which has all of the flesh ripped from it.

• × • × • × •

I cried myself to sleep last night.

I woke up two hours later bawling and about to keel over in agony because it felt like everything in my stomach was waging a writhing war against everything else. It felt like I had eaten my own sadness and my own fear.

Of course, in a way, I had.

We all do.

I wanted to throw up, but I couldn't. The bad things inside you don't give up and evacuate just because you want them to.

I somehow fell back into despairing sleep and was there until late this morning, making it to work exactly 15 minutes after I should have. I've gotten to work exactly 15 minutes late every day straight for two weeks. It feels like it's been my whole life.

I went straight to the bathroom with three swallows of coffee and half a banana in my stomach.

My stomach still hurts, and so does the part of my brain that holds my happiness and my sadness.

(I think they are in the same place.)

I started to cry. I cried because I thought someone loved me, but when he started to learn who I am, he was taken aback. I cried because (like anyone—like everyone?) I need to be loved not only for myself, but in spite of myself. I cried because I was in my fucking office, in the bathroom stall, crying and pathetic. I cried because sometimes you have to. I cried because once you start it's sometimes impossible to stop. I cried because it was finally making the bad things inside me leave.

But it was only coming back to my desk and writing this—scrawling this story in pencil in my primitive brown leather book on roughly made brown paper from a little old man's Cambodian hands—it was only this that has really made me feel like MYSELF again. My real self, all outside stimuli be damned.

So if you've read all this, made it through this pure bright winter morning coated in salt, you're special to me. And I love you.

• × • × • × •

Once upon a time, there was a princess.

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