Packing today has been made hard because my hands are on fire I can barely use them.
It is something to think about.
Phone ringsringsrings.
A system failure.
System wide failure.
Some man was singing in his backyard this morning while Jesus found somewhere to pee.
It is hard to think when your hands are burning. I have a feeling that the fire is out of control and will-spread.
I am going to cut them off.
T can have my clothes and all those things she’d appreciate, like furniture and stuff. She can also have all my money.
B can have the house so he can sell it and that will give him lots. It would be nice if he’d care for jesus, but t would take her too.
Oh and all the tech stuff, computers and tv’s, toyota etc he can have too.
I’m sure you guys won’t fight over it or anything. Maybe give matt and jeff my convertible because they’d fix it up.
I can’t make good decisions or even understand what is good for me anymore. I used to be so sure but now I do things I’m sure about and they work opposite. The thing that felt good aren’t and the things that are supposed to feel good don’t.
That’s all really.
I like running. And yoga.
Please someone tell my mother it is her fault. Might help her to have a reaction.
After watching my grandfather die and realizing that I am trapped in the way he lived his life. Right now I feel he is lucky. I don’t have cancer yet but I can’t spend all my time exercising. I can’t eat at all anymore. I know it is because I kept taking clonazapam. More and more and more trying to make changes easier. It worked opposite. I will take a few more now just to start.
I’m going to try to run and feel better now. If I don’t I am going eat every pill I have, just like a girl. But I won’t throw up. That would be silly. I’ll put lots of food and water out for Jesus.
I’m sorry. Please get someone to get Jesus because I feel bad about that. I tried to tell tl how bad I was feeling but she was busy. B, I have had such evil thoughts because I am so direly afraid of men. It doesn’t go away and that hurts you you deserve better. I’m sure this will make a good story you can write about.
I want to be there. I want to be here. I want to want the right things but my brain betrays me. Here’s to running.
If I could gather everything I love and enjoy
into my hand
and hold it together and be certain I could do that whenever I need to
I wouldn't fill up with familiar hate.
It is like things repeat.
Because they are.
It's shameful but it is true. The fear so long ingrained in me
about certain people overpowers everything. Proof, experience, truth. That's a useless word.
Because, like the hard scientists know, if you ask the right questions you will get your answers.
So I ask the right questions.
And again again again I'm proven right! I'm right! I'm Right!
When does it transition into being my fault for asking the damaging questions.
Can I get extra time for repetition and intensity of negative experience? Does it compound or is it only
additive.
The thing is: it isn't at all like that. The horror is that I have been shaped by these things.
When a cock got shoved down my throat at three, along with a hold in my throat, it opened up a logical order for me that I needed and
still live within. I know it, I know I should stop, I know I am trying.
Because now it makes all of you my violent enemy.
I hear voices. I just noticed. Not my own voice telling me what to think. But a bright heated voice that screams
so loud my head rings to kill, to run, to gather weapons for the impending attack.
I
Every day I speak to my father. You know what he says? Nothing! No such thing as ghosts that way.
A woman just asked me, with the utmost consideration, where I wanted the knob on my shutters placed. She
spoke attentively and kindly. When I told her, she made a suggestion and was extremely helpful in my
decision making process.
I was paying her.
Today I told my father that, just like him, I couldn't get across to people what I really mean. He kidnapped
me when really he meant I really love something! and I wrote about how alone and hurt I feel when really I meant I
really love something!
He didn't say anything back again. There were no signs he heard. But I knew if he did, he'd sympathize.
"you're funny"
"you don't know anything, do you?"
"I'm not sorry for liking girls."
"I'm no longer your MOTHER!"
I like having fun too. Yesterday everything expanded and got filthy.
I can't tell how much is in here yet. It's expanding. While I work away decorations, trees,
cablefliers appear. But not that they appear; they were always there. It is only my noticing
that changed.
Expansion is like that, it's a pain. A parenthetic tree, dripping value unevenly into my
sidelines. Not my focus - no that is always laser clear.
Right now, dancing edges and shrieking shrinking significancies, it is comforting the refrain:
"you don't know anything, do you?" spoken by Karen Black in Martin Scorses' first film You're a Big Boy Now 1966.
I am one I am one!
An unknowable percentage of me is better equipped for life 150 years ago. Life of a dairy-milking mother of 10 who kept her floors shining, quilts finely pieced, breads risen, children silent and husband fed easily. I hate it and I love it in turn.
An update:
It is more of that black and white thinking.
I remember in an early email exchange with you, before we met, you said you were a person of extremes. I told you that I was too.
I dully repeat like a doll with a voice-string on my ass that I don't know what to do, what is expected of me in love.
Sometimes, when I look at my friends that I care deeply for my eyes burn because I'm sure I'm using them wrong. Wrong eyes,
wrong fingers and blinks. What I mean is that it is a matter of extremes.
Because I grew entirely accustomed to being alone and learning about everything in isolation I feel guilty in love. I try to be perfect in love. Perfectly there and entirely present and eager and exuberant. The opposite of what I have always known.
It is an exquisite failure system. I can't, no one could, meet these standards. So I falter. I can't be entirely present and perfect. And I am unable (unable unable) to advocate for myself and my requirements of aloneness. I forget. I forget willingly and eagerly. Because they make me feel guilty.
I get trapped there, between extremes. My failures pile up and fill me with confusion and anger.
The hardened parts of me yearn to hold onto things that will never change, move or disagree. To strain out all else. To think about the floors instead of your quiet gestures of confusion or pain. That is, as you intimately understand, why I take medication. Because it stops the floor thoughts cold and it is such a relief. A fair trade to lose that, and that hardness. Even when it means enduring a few hours of bleak grief gated by past and recent memories of ugliness and loss.
I won't repeat it anymore, that I don't know what is expected of me. That is the wrong sentence. I do know when I am free of sick thought: I am expected to understand the nuances of people, relationships. To be able to manipulate the pillars of relationship like appendages that do good works. Like, relationships are forged upon the problems overcome and survived and not upon the difficulties avoided. It is what makes Tammy and I so close: our highschool disaster. And Taraleigh and I like sisters: our(my) roadtrip psychosis. And you and I. We faced the aftermath of your illness, the unexpected and unannounced peaks of mine. And not in spite of but because of these things we move ahead. Better. Stronger. Nothing to do with perfection at all.
Billy Angel, of Roky Erickson and the Aliens, emailed me a warning a week ago. He had just had a dream that he was a passenger in my car as I sped fast on a dark highway, wearing a blindfold. He wanted me to let him know if this email was prophetic or bullshit.
I don’t know him.
Today I touched the fabrics I have collected for twenty years. That denim jumpsuit was from Goodwill in Louisiana TL picked it out. This sea-themed shirt I bought with baby-sitting money from Esprit when I was 17. That skirt I bought in New York when I was working there at Harmony, taking my cut out of Wallstreet through the laps of fevered businessmen. That antique velvet skirt from an estate sale in Daytona Florida, the original owner long dead now.
I certainly don’t have a blindfold on, I only wish I did. Right now, if I were to die, I like that my clothes would be parted out. Trashed, taken by friends and donated back into the very places I got them from. I’ve spent the day with my clothes, my house, my dog planning how to speak to my mother. Disinterest and distress rally for position in my emotional register. My mother hasn’t seen hardly any of these clothes, she wouldn’t recognize them as mine. She could accidentally go to a thrift store and buy one of my ugly sweaters after I was dead because we have overlapping tastes in glitter and colour.
Over and over I decide today to recall all my plans and articulations about how I will regard her as sick, merely human. But of course memory is gory. Age 11: she throws me over her knee to spank me and my temple smashes against the nightstand. She stops dead, aghast and looks at me letting me retreat across the bed. She tells me, no matter what don’t go to sleep. Age 17: I tell her I am moving out and she gives me her trademark, devil-may-care grin crossed with her leg bounce. Age 15: My mother tells me, across the supper table (that no one ate supper at), that she had to change our phone number because we were getting crank calls….(from my dying dad she left out accidentally).
I have let all of this go. And that is why each tendon across my back is singing in rhythm to my heartbeat which is so loud I have to turn the tv all the way up. It’s easy. It doesn’t matter. She is sick.
And I yearn to go be someone else. For other people’s tedious troubled families. To have an annoying mother who calls me and argues about my life decisions. I dream of going home sometimes, though it was never there, and run my hands over the walls of faux oak I’ve now replaced with the real thing. I want her to see my house and investigate it out of curiosity and concern. To look at all my clothes and know all the stories of where they came from and not just the facts about the strange silver top and pink blouse I bought with her over half my lifetime ago so she wouldn’t accidentally be able to buy my sweater once I’m dead. I want her to travel across the world to see me or at least across southwestern Ontario.
Nope.
And this is hard to explain because I can’t. I know I am missing something, that I am blind and speeding along, but I can’t help myself. The problem isn’t her, or me it is my addiction to the pain. Of crashing crashing over and over, into the night table, into the vast hydroplaning emptiness of shutting off everything inside me except for keeping my sister away from my Barbies, my sheets off Max’s skin, the television on inside me.
Early this morning a House Sparrow broke through the crack in my window and darted around my bed. I was alarmed! But then, when it began to crash into me and tear tiny beakfulls of flesh from my thin neck, scalp, lips and shoulders, relief flooded through. This pain, sharp and direct, was silencing the mouthless internal ache of grief, shame and loss.
Loss? Destruction? Succumbing to sickness. Excuses.
I had never known empathy and so my caring for people was circumscribed by material concerns. At 19, as I sipped my Milo supper, I told my best friend that she was a fool to believe that anyone ever cared about anything but themselves and that she had better learn to look out for herself. Survival. All my relationships were for and about this. What could this person do to further my nutritional needs? How could they help me pay my rent? Could I use their computer? In fact, she was there because she paid half the rent. So I tolerated her.
This structured my life. Entirely. My pleasure was in perfecting survival, a dissonant orchestra of compulsions and deprivations.
Until I met you and everything fell apart.
You pulled out of me a powerful empathy. I could see how you were like me. A real living, deeply emotional person.
I was overwhelmed. Dazzled within the newness of reciprocal love. But still trapped between my survivalism and this shocking, healthy reason for relationship. I coped by weaving the two together. Offering everything I could that was kind, from shelter to home cooking as a counterbalance to the powerful foreign feelings you evoked. The pain I felt when you hurt, the concern I felt for your well-being – I can’t adequately describe how unwieldy these felt inside my small body. It devoured me. Who was I fooling? Unreality mixed with love and I fell all over myself trying to move ahead by silencing what I believed to be my own selfish and poisonous needs. Blind and mappless, I kept slamming into my needs and desires anyways. So I acted horribly. I built one more perfect Barbie house for us to pose in with plastic smiles awaiting joy. I even had us clean once a week, just like I did for my Barbies.
You told me again and again that this was not the way. But I was trapped within cycles of emotional repression, sex secrets, guilt and responsibility for your happiness. I felt sure this was the only corrective to my vileness and it drained everything out of me.
It is no surprise I suppose that these movements lead here. To enjoying death by small bird. My desperate need to survive is closed, is a curse I now oppose with bird. The love that transformed my world is now poisoned by my inexperience and sickness having triggered your necessarily protective dissassociations. The only person I have ever wanted to protect from pain and harm is horribly hurt and damaged by me.
Of course, I have known terrible grief in my life: The loss within denial of my father. The hollowness of my mother. And now I can place another notch on my grief belt. Meeting your soul mate and bashing them out of your life with your weakness and disease.
Hopefully this expresses cleanly what I have already tried to say: I am not to blame but I still accept and own tremendous responsibility. We finally found our familiar voice by revealing all our old tricks without restraint. I miraculously opened up about so many things. The crucial opportunity to have emotional integrity feels like a cure. There are more things but, imperfect as I am, it is okay and I know I will get to them.
Today and every day you deserve honesty, integrity and openness to surround you. I gave you some of that but, of late, more consistently services and stuff.
I always loved birthdays because it was the one day I left my sickness behind and let myself say what I felt.
Plan a celebration equal of you. Something astoundingly good and beautiful. (and you know I don’t just mean your cock).
Happy Birthday.
The smallest trench of all, I am digging it around my ears, my hands, my teeth.
Looping trenches like garlands like beads around my throat
tight.
When the bottom fell out it fell fast.
When I landed I will land hard.
But I am falling for a while, a short while.
There are all sorts of measurements gliding around the trenches trying to get out
Competing for attention. My attention but all I feel is air
Abrasive on my cheeks, my eyes so they burn and tear
apart.
