I lied. I lied so hard. I didn't say anything because that was just the absolute summation of most of this blog.

But you know what, meta mostly non poetic post here. I know why I chose apathy and misery for so long. Being happy -or excited, I'm excitable, I don't know if this can ever turn into happy- is fucking torture. It hurts so much deeper than apathy. I want to rip my lungs out for lack of caring to scream out all the pent up bullshit I've been running away from these last few years.

I know I'm getting better because my emotional capacity is returning, but/because holy shit it hurts so much. I think this is what the Grinch must have felt like. I stay up endlessly so many nights just looking for some answer on my fucking computer while thinking about aimlessly driving and looking for yet something else. I will never stop searching for some way to connect all the bitter bits of me so I can stop feeling so lonely and wistful and stuck in the past where I AM happy. I am only ever happy in retrospect.

I have let go of so many wonderful people and moments throughout my great shut-off. People are essentially shitty and will always leave you, but damn it, they can be so cool while they are there, and I used to know how to take advantage of that in order to survive and actually form some kind of joy.

THAT. It's that acceptance of everything being horrible and sad from INSIDE of my happiness. That's Becca. She knows how to deal and keep smiling and mean it. She is the pity AND the party and it's so beautiful and I really admire her from where I'm standing because only after all of the emotionally and mentally unstable stretches I've gone through do I realize how hard that actually was for her.

I want to drown you all in rivers, surprise, I always feel like crying. It's the only relief for the wordless anger and overwhelming confusion I will always walk through life with. I used to truly believe I was partially of a different world where people lived more delicately and that I never felt quite real in order to protect myself from this one. I miss knowing myself, I realize that now, and I'm coming back to actually being alone in a good way and not in a lost one.

And I think I now, as I recurrently do, know that much of my deep seated rage is misdirected at those around me. It's me. I'm pissed at myself for this. I have long ago recognized problems of letting go. I used to spend afternoons pouring over polaroids and most of my conversations with others are "Hey, remember that time we..." and it always reminds me of the things I always hated about my family but never knew how to fix because  IT WASN'T MY RESPONSIBILITY, but now wish I had been able to verbalize then, because I think this basic disconnection with my relatives really does cause a whole lot of my abandonment and social confidence issues but whatever that's not even the point.

The point is I have hope. I can't even tell you how much I HATE the concept of hope and even uttering the word is shiver-worthy. But I find myself looking forward and back and feeling like I can pull up that mental habitat I used to live in where it's always the perfect end-of-all-my-childhood-movies Fall temperature where each moment I form ends its own story and I can go to bed peacefully and not look back and where every good smell is a bookstore under a full moon and where I can retreat to the corner of my room with trance music and a wiccan book and feel like I do mean something and be satisfied in my small pine tree town and stay in wake-ups and bedtimes forever to get through the monotony of what's really happening. I am a fairy princess, I am Party Cat, and though I am really just an enormous fuck-up, maybe I can be somethings like that again. Let me live.

But you see, the point is that sometimes

I get really sad and I don't know why.

And I'm not trying to hurt you

but I know I am and I'm sorry.

I'm so sorry.

I'm in white heels and a bouncy black dress that twists when I do.

I can't see myself but damn it if I can't feel the heat bubbling up

under my skin and propelling my words across the void to

angrily land where welts will be seconds later on my neighbor's face.

I don't remember the details, but what else is new.

There's a group, a family, I think it must be mine.

In in a wooden house, walls, floor, rafters, all cherry or oak

or some other ridiculous species we shouldn't be able to afford.

So already I'm feeling like a little animal in a forest who's got a mark

on its head and plans for its future that aren't its own.

So I run. I'm so angry, and I run.

Full tilt through a piano room and then a hallway and

very, very intentionally

into a door.

It doesn't move, so I pivot on the spot and just scream silently forward

with every little atom of me

still listening to chatters floating in from a few rooms over,

they're still unaware. Good.

I collide with some set of chests holding candles and glass,

and my brain is on its tippytoes but nothing happens.

So it's back to the door.

I don't know if I go through this simply

in order to turn around and run the other way

or if this in itself serves a purpose. I don't know what's behind that door

so the answer to that is really out of the question.

Regardless I'm running back to the chests, shoulder sharp and pointed out,

and I see it tilt, but not enough, though a glass shatters and I am happy.

Away, I return.

Finally! It tilts tilts tilts past its center of gravity,

and I know this time I did it.

I felt the piece of glass slide into my shin straight to safety

amoungst a cluster of my veins,

but I am not there to see the crash because I'm halfway to my door.

I am ecstatic but I need to hide. I feel like there's

a seldom used room behind the door, which would make it safe

to enter and burrow down into. I pull the glass from my skin and

look at how thick it is and red at the tip. I don't feel anything.

The brief pleasure the chaos has brought me is over

and this chapter is going black.

I don't know what happened

but I have the distinct feeling that I am listening to someone

reading my funeral rites.

For a moment I panic and worry I am awake in a coffin,

but then I roll over and assure myself I'm an angel.

Then I wake up.

There's a road -

not like, a metaphorical road that Robert Frost writes about -

but a real street, that I lived on.

I characterize it by what I did on it when I was a child

which honestly wasn't much because I had a fence

and I stayed inside it until I was 9.

Actually 15, but 9 sounds more poetic

and less recluse-y.

That's my mother's fault though.

She just wanted to protect me from all the creeps

and weirdos that got at me anyways

from inside the tv screen.

This is that existential suburban cry of desperation

from the mouth of a kid who didn't even understand

what a potluck was until her freshman year homecoming dinner

where kids took a night off from their pills and drinking for a wholesome family event

where I felt even more out of place than I would have at the party

because who knew anyone even did pills anymore anyways?

I wonder how many times my street has been repaved?

I don't ever remember seeing them ripping up the concrete

or having to take a different path to get home,

but damn it if I didn't want an excuse to stay outside of my yard

for an extra 15 minutes, sidestepping the holes punched in the sidewalks.

Okay, it would have been more like 5 minutes because the streets in my neighborhood

are all interconnected but let's say that for the sake

of my pre-adolescent dreams of freedom that it was much longer.

So I'm a lot older now, and I complain about the same basic stuff,

and I know, I know that there's like a million different solutions

to my stupid, ridiculous, over-exaggerated problems,

but I think I got trapped, okay? I got shafted from an early age.

This attitude is learned and hard to break

and there are at least 3 different streets

going in 3 different directions around my building that I can immediately think of

which I could walk down,

or wait, drive down, because hey, even if I got my license a year after everyone else,

I have it now and that's what counts.

It's like when I say I'm going to take a shower or go running though.

You walk into my bedroom three hours later

and I've been sitting at my computer in a towel for two of them,

and I would have put on my sneakers this morning

if I had only been able to find a matching pair of socks.

There's no real excuse for what I'm doing

but it's... I guess the easiest form of escapism

For a girl who got fenced in and was told not to open the gate

even though I knew the combination... and how to pick it,

just in case they changed it.

They never did, in case you were wondering.

I told all my friends the code too,

you could probably still get in if you wanted to raid my kitchen

or say hi to my mom

who really doesn't know how to handle sudden visits like that

so you might want to call ahead

even though we never pick up the phone either,

which is actually disconnected now

and that's not metaphorical either,

that house is like a veritable communication fortress.

We have a dog.

I want to kick him.

We've had dogs since before I was born, and he's

the 5th in that long line, but that doesn't change the fact

that I don't like dogs and never will.

The fact that I tried so hard to bond with my father

by playing baseball and poking the eyes of fish he'd caught,

and sitting next to him in the garage for hours at a time

while he drank and smoked and read a novel

maybe about the compassion I would later

completely refuse to give him because he yelled

at my friends for approaching the fence

and making the dogs bark and called me a whore in the 6th grade

which wasn't damaging, just funny because at that point

I was used to quietly, angrily defending me and my sister,

silently staring and daring him to hit me like he so dearly wanted to ever

since that one time that my mom yelled at him

and stopped him from being the abusive fuck I know he would have been

had he been allowed

makes me even more sure of myself when I bitterly spit sentences at him

that hold up a younger more feminine mirror of himself

before he got all old and sad and sorry.

And you're gonna laugh because I'm a happy white girl with daddy issues

and a goddamned whore mouth who makes damn good sammiches

thank you very much,

but I'm working on it

sometimes

kind of

not really since that April in 8th grade when I decided it'd be a really good idea to

well, lots of things, not eating was probably my favorite because honestly

I still have no idea why that happened and I think it just

the most perfect example of how I operate. I do things

I just do them, okay? I don't have many feelings about them

or needs to rationalize them to myself,

just to the voices of my friends who are a lot harsher than they need to be

which is maybe just me trying to psych myself out so that when I actually

have to deal with people asking why I can just give them an answer

I prepared for one of the voices without having to put much conviction behind it.

and oh my god to think I'd forgotten about that stupid

stupid stupid harmless juvenile party in the 7th grade

that I was embarrassed about for so long

when I do things now that are just so not okay

but kind of are because we're a society just plagued

by dumb taboos and feelings that there are things

we should be hiding about ourselves

and that makes me question why I think it's okay to keep

some people around when they do nothing but

make me upset about what I think and want,

and sometimes I say that's what real friends are

who show you the cold facts about yourself.

But honestly I haven't felt like someone's taken

me and exalted this god awful pit for one minute

because they are too busy telling me why carrying

this pit around is a safety measure

to keep me from running and jumping off some bridge.

But that's not right because I wanted to jump

off that goddamned bridge,
and I was wearing a bungee cord anyways
so you should have just chilled out and been like

you go gay baby or magical unicorn or princess puppy castle dreamboat supreme.

I knew what I was doing. Now I'm just so aggravated all the time

and I say I know what I'm doing,

but do I really? Am I going to wake up in 10 years and not be able to get out of bed

because of the way I behave now?

I think worst case scenario, I try a lot of different things that I always said I would

and that are as awesome as I wanted them to be

and that allow me to throw you the biggest goddamned middle finger on the planet

while I tell you why you were wrong to remind me about GPAs

and the reality principle and the people I'm responsible for

because we all would have been a lot more fucking miserable

if I had finished anything

because finishing something defeats the beautiful dream I had at the outset

and closes that chapter like a job well done that doesn't ever need to be revisited

and I don't want to be the 25 year old who ends back up on the same road

on her mother's couch with a thousand yard stare that envelops

the neighboring houses that are a different shade than way back then.

I don't know if it's in my building or in my bed,

but all I know is it's a bassline thumbprint

in my brain, a telltale heart

tapping me on the shoulder

in these inescapeable moments

when I'm stripped down

without strangers to distract me

or the television to do the same,

to make sure I remember

how small I am:

A pinprick disruption

in the fabric of black that I'm huddled in now.

I pulse as I curl it inside,

thump thump with the beat of the same cloth I'm cut from.

My heart is an orange peeled,

bringing scents of sunshine everywhere.

It grew up in the summertime.

Not clockwork but wild,

with vines trailing sideways

reaching and running

until they hit something they can crack though.

I am insatiable and I'm holding on to a ghost

but that's another story.

Right now it wants to give you everything

you've ever thought you'd needed.

Blossoms and seeds

held in a fist you've made

and I don't even feel

confined. I don't mind.

This isn't about you

and it couldn't be about me

I'm just a tool used

in an attempt

to do anything gentle

that a summer fruit is capable of.

You've become more

than the sum of your parts

and I hope you'll think

to pocket these seeds and bring me along

for whatever unreal

dream of a journey

you're going to start on,

via the hands

of those who love you

and turn the wheels of creation

just to see you smile.

I'm happy patching holes for others

the ones in myself can wait.

'Cause doing good for you

doesn't get you very far

if you're smugly sitting cross-legged

by yourself on someone else's lawn.

So I work for other people

asking them what else I can do.

Really, please give me one more thing,

A labor I can complete with love,

and certainty that the traces I leave

on a person or room when my fingers

aren't busied by their objects

will be more than they were when

they were with me. Or at least

longer lasting, not a thin veil

of wavering sensibility

that couldn't really affect anyone

unless it was keeping them from breathing.