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.
On the one hand, the girls were running in the fields behind my house.
I saw them and didn't see them, we were alone. Except we were divided by distance, at least an acre away and also behind the chicken coops and green houses but I could still see them clearly because I made up the details I couldn't see in my mind.
They were hiding but in that way teenagers hide when they know they are being seen.
Each of the girls, or maybe there was only one, was wearing t-shirts that reached just above their knees. They(She) was crouching behind the barbed-wire fence that kept in the neighbourhood sheep. All of a sudden, in a flurry of fleshy activity they got up and ran away.
I was left with the impression that I had seen something I shouldn't and later, at the community center track in town, I heard more about dirty things that happened.
I can remember a lot of thing just like that, I can see parts of what I originally saw. Unfortunately the periphery sometimes only.
I can’t trust anyone, I know that. And as he moves closer I have to move farther away because the plan must certainly be to destroy me. The only thing I know for sure is I have to protect myself and take care of myself. If I give any of that up, even a corner, I will regret it. Then punish myself for it.
The more depressed and silent he becomes the more certain I am that he is plotting against me, mapping out a way to take away what I have put in place for myself. All I can ever know is my own danger. That is the trap.
Everything feels entirely different. You came here and I left. I guess I wasn’t ready. I thought I was but I am not. I am not yet able to trust my judgement enough to be sure that in choosing you I chose wisely. I look at you and I see threat where before was safety. What hurts worse than anything is that you can’t stop it, you are too sick to step outside of my trap and remind me that you are not my enemy and so, in maintaining a nobigdeal veneer you become proof. I send, you send and we respond not at all correctly. We are crossed, things are shutting and closing at rates impossible to follow.
He killed the help
give me the gun
It broke and blue powder,
the colour of eyes stained my finger
and burned going down.
Now, both real and imaginary,
bricks bounce off my sternum and the veins in my neck become arteries,
arteries into twigs of ironwood trees.
Even in my towards direction I’m backwards. When I feel
things they don’t come. I tell you about pain, I talk about things that don’t matter which builds to unleashments and an hour later
I am in my well-equipped vehicle with Hot Chic dying.
If I could be anything, I’d be summer 07 balenciaga eyewear resting on
reformed bridges everywhere. Instead I am here, uniformed and smeared with ride symptoms.
HOORAY!
This blog, if it is to continue, must be repurposed: for the distance in my long distance relationship has now been removed.
CELEBRATE!
My dog likes to sleep with her head on my hip. I like to sleep when someone is asking me pointed questions. Somehow I feel most like sleeping when I am completely sure I won’t be able to (like in therapy or driving).
I am trying purposefully to eat enough and I can manage that if it is mostly composed of frozen yogurt and chocolate. By the end of every day though I feel like I wish I had eaten nothing at all, as though food sullies me and I think wistfully back to times when I was not shackled to such a chore and felt purified.
Someone in kindness told me I was stunning today. I scoffed inwardly. Maybe because I am 1000 years old right now and old is ugly.
I am not the man I used to be.
I have, among other things, tremendous willpower. That is something I have always been sure of. A way I would have of describing myself to others if they asked. I was aware of it at various times in my life when I would make a decision about how to live my life and then, despite how unpleasant it was, stick to it. Examples: living off $5.00 a month for my first year of university. Or my decision, over ten years ago, to run every day no matter the health or weather calamity. Even my decisions about how and when and what to eat severely limiting my social and physical health.
More recently I have become aware of other ways I have used my willpower. As a child, I willed myself to feel no emotions for any living thing only material things and fictional characters like houses and the certain cast members of All My Children. Later, I willed myself to be in a painful relationship with someone I did not like nor respect to normalize the results of my earlier decision.
I am now willing myself to stop all this. And in the process coming to doubt my willpower. Because, while those things I decided to do seemed difficult to others they were really easy to me. And now – willing myself to be physically and emotionally healthy – is hard. Sometimes so painful that I can’t actually stand it.
But.
But, despite the absolute pain and impossibilities and in some ways because of it, there remains a formulation of hope. Hope in the shape of you. After spending the past few weeks with you I can begin to understand more of what relationships that work are for. Not to tether myself artificially to reality. Nor to punish myself in soothingly familiar ways for being shameful and a burden.
I think maybe relationships like ours are to remind me of what my life should have in it, of how to feel passionate for something and not compulsively driven. It is helping me move away from a structure of battling absolutes and wills and towards something far more messy, frighteningly unpredictable and yet still starkly beautiful: a kind of trust in myself that goes beyond knowing I can decide to do something and make it so.
Less than a week and distance will no longer be relevant. And while I have been, overall, too clawed into the sadness of my history to write coherently I am feeling stronger right now. I have to keep my thoughts pulled back, that is the secret.
We spoke today about the changing meanings of our relationship. In my mind it seems like some sort of living thing that we create. It is so strange to me to have created something so entirely good and hopeful. When I try to describe it I get frustrated because they are the wrong words, over and over and never adequate. I guess I do not have the experience to even really try.
There are some small seeds in me still with the sadness that tell me that if I really cared for you I’d want you to be free of what I often feel is my inescapable past, capacities that I worry I can never regain. I grow afraid that the hideous and broken down thing that I am is hidden behind a shellac I meticulously built so I could chase my compulsions and gather around me soothing decorations and containers. So you just don't see it. Maybe can't recognize something so horrible. The specter of the revulsion dipped in fear in my mother’s eyes when she regards me chases me forever. The more greatness and goodness I see in you the stronger the guilt about my duplicity. I know these feelings are not real. But something being real or not has not got enough to do with me.
These are just controllable pieces. Usually controllable. I write about them because these are also the places that, when something is difficult, spread over me entirely.
One thing is sometimes I need to shut everything out. I don’t do a good job of keeping unimportant people at a distance and all of their demands pile up until I just close entirely down.
I don’t like not sleeping well of course. But when I am tired there is safety in it. When I am well rested and very relaxed I sometimes get vivid and uncomfortable physical sensations. The feeling of some sort of inanimate and cold object, like a dead human hand, being pushed inside of me. It doesn’t hurt so much as burn, but more importantly, leaves me feeling inexplicably devastated and alarmed. So the calm is broken. I tell myself it is not important, there is nothing really happening but when it happens it seems the realest thing of all.
It doesn't bleed into the other parts of my life but stays contained, anchoring my other secret world through shame and grief. I don't talk about it because I don't want it to define me.
The problem of living a life full of pain and disaster is that it becomes commonplace. The soothingly familiar. Anything falling outside the pattern becomes an aberration and a watch clock can be set on it, waiting, waiting, for things that bring happiness and hope to turn into expected punishments and death.
I fight hard not to do that with you. When you fail to disappoint me and continue with your unerring support and care I imagine terrible deaths to come. I won’t lie to myself and say it is all entirely healthy: Your depression and thoughts of suicide may well be what opened me to you in the first place. They offered me a flaw in a different place. Where before I accepted emotional vacuity and occasional abuse both mental and physical, now I could have my unhappy ending in a different flavour.
The problem is that you have changed me. Knowing you and allowing you to love me has made it impossible not to expect that in people. Never again will I be able to accept a self-flaggellating life. So the rhythm of tragedy by death that I imagined for myself is broken. The weakness of such logic is revealed.
Good things might not last. As it has been with you, they might get better and better.
Since I have slept most of the weekend I thought I would go out to get fruit. So I don’t know if it was that, the pills I am on for the chronic pain in my back or just too much sleep. But I am having a fracture with reality.
I woke up a few hours ago with amnesia. I did not know who I was, where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. It lasted for about five minutes. Not long enough to matter.
But then, when I stepped outside I felt like I was glowing. Like there was light being thrown off of me that made other people uncomfortable. At the store I had to rest for a moment when the pain in my back took my breath away. That was when I burned brightest.
I have this terrible feeling that this is it. That this pain is what will be part of my life because I have had so long to know it was coming. Just for going out, even with the pills, it is hard to not just think about pain. I can’t sit, write or use my right arm with out screams of protest from the nerves in my spine.
It has a rhythm, the pain. The same as my heartbeat. If I don’t breath and just listen it has a hypnotizing effect.
I am not a fearful person?
Mostly friends ask me if I thought through what I was doing because it seemed risky to them. I answer yes - I’ll go anywhere alone at night in any country, repel cliffs without a proper harness, ride a bicycle hundreds of miles with no helmet or light and dart through traffic using only my peripheral vision.
How surprising and messy it is then that I am the most fear-filled person of all.
Because I am persistently afraid of my home. Not of houses or your home.
Mine.
The home I live in.
It is not something I think about. I did not, riding the subway home this evening think, OH FUCK NOT HOME. Rather, I was looking forward to returning to some work and eating some frozen yogurt (vanilla).
I wish it was something I thought.
I push through my front door and put on my indoor flip-flop shoes. Slowly the burning ache in my back, gone for most of the evening, hums awake. I put away groceries. My eyes and temples begin to sink and grow with my heartbeat. I boil a kettle for tea and put away dishes. I have to stop for a minute and work hard to find a full breath.
What, I thought, do I do. Where, I wonder, do I go. Because anywhere I go, if I stay there long enough, becomes home.
And then I remember living in my car long ago as if it is some type of answer and not a cause.
