Lonely Hallelujah
A deep dark cloud settled over my evening and I thought of Elena out of the blue, something about her boyfriend giving her trouble in a way that would shape our current friendship. I felt it in my heart, but told myself I was just being a jealous single person even though I'm mostly happy being in my world with just me..or at least I am so far. Ever since I found my true solid center and realized that I am meant to live a long life despite the option out of this crazy world I feel illness could lend me if I wished, I've been more so vividly, accurately psyhcic. It's almost as if the world is a sheer blank slate upon which I can not only see the events of others's live charts unfold before or as they occur, but also my own. Once I found myself and discovered the truest, most important things I want to come of my life- the sacred holy bread of my personal blessed communion into this world as an independent woman- it has been just like some mysterious hand pressed "fast forward" and I began to see many of the things that would happen to me before they actually did.
Some of it is trivial, like knowing my reading would be postponed till a later date and knowing I'd be well enough to go to my photo shoot..and even knowing that although I lost my breath enough to faint in the car and when I came to my heart burned and palpitated too much to utter a word the other day , I was not having a heart attack, and would actually feel better in the afternoon. Or I'll know really mundane things like the weather. But aside from the trivial, I realized once I found my center that my lifeline is long and I'm definitely going to get married and perform in the future, so long as I find a way to get my late stage Lyme disease and other health problems treated so that they are no longer dangerous to my life. If the bloodwork that's been abnormal since I first lost my insurance really didn't lie and I do have a bone marrow cancer, I have realized that I won't even accept it if the top doctor in the whole damn country tells me I have two months to live from having it undetected so long. I would not feel, touch, and see the that holy bread of my future if it wasn't really ahead of me. Lately whenever I intuit the damage to my organs from being sick so long and the dangers that lie ahead (or even when I just let the black nightmare of my worst fears take hold of me), I sit in the dark and meditate on the past I've left behind that has made me who I am, and the future I hold like a folded map inside me now. The dark I sit quietly within in is new and scary, but the house I grew up in is bathed in a whole new light to me and my mother's hatred of me has almost all but ceased to affect my soul. I know I will not be living here much longer. I will soon not belong to these walls. Sometimes I literally see myself being released from the peach tile and dim yellow shadows that live in these walls, for those old memories no longer shape me. I am my own, and the stale angry lights of the past have begun to hang golden in new showers over me even though my mother is more hateful than ever. She even told me the other day that she hated me now but would happily take care of me when they put me on hospice. When, not if, mind you. My heart broke in a million little pieces and I cried because the woman who is supposed to feel like my mother would rather see me dead than happy and free and successful in spite of the hell she did to me. My house looked gray and I felt lost in it, but a voice loud enough to encompass my whole world spoke directly into me so that I could not have disbelieved its presence if I wanted to. It said that soon I would be gone from here, that I wasn't going to die from this bout of illness, and my life was starting totally new. And then my heart was filled with and transformed by so much love within the few seconds the light of my future flashed before me that I could not care less if my mother can't truly love. The hurt may always be with me, insuniating itself into the cement cracks of my life path all the way through to the end and making it so very hard to have relationships, for there is always a black hole of lonely space in me where my mother hated me and all my loved ones' mothers didn't. The experience of being brutalized physically and spiritually through childhood has made me whole, but is has also made me tired, cynical, and impatient with most men. I am a natural loner who is more than content just enjoying the lone space of myself and writing my poetic history, enjoying trips to bookstores or lingerie shops in the company of only myself during my much loathed (though admittedly much-needed) medical leave from my job. It's almost like there are two of us, I enjoy my own company so much these days.
No one else I know is like that except for Elena's sister Anna. None of my friends would turn down the person she loved all her life to meditate on becoming more whole and enjoy the sheer bliss of independence and hard-earned good self-esteem. Being in my own company when I fully like myself is almost like making the best friend I ever had in this world- or even meeting God in a sense, because I would not be this full, internally satisfied person if I had not realized that God is the sheer, absolute center of even this crazy world. But since no one else I know likes being alone as much as I do and a romantic relationship is the center of most of my friends' worlds, I am suddenly aware that there is a barren place in me that cannot relate to anyone else I know. It's endlessly lonely despite that I AM a loner, because I'm still human and need people I can relate to! You'd think no that I've finally accepted that I'm happy with my chosen lifestyle would make me happy- and it does- but it also makes me sadder and more lonely than I've ever been in my life. I do want a steady relationship in the future, but if I really couldn't have one the disappointment would probably not even put a dent in my world. I have no friends who share my stance in life, and so a part of me feels one hundred percent alone and untouched. Some days it brings me down, down, down below everyone else and my mood just feels terribly off, especially around Elena. I think it's because I really think I mean so much less to her than Rob does, and today she confirmed my suspicions that he doesn't like her being friends with me. Supposedly Elena told him I got a photographer to take pictures of her since she wants to try and do some plus-sized modeling, and he snapped that I'm one of those catty girls who only wants to "steal her thunder." Elena was telling me crying that he says my intentions are not what they seem and TRUST HIM, I know that if we went for the same career I'd get all the gigs and success because I'm skinny and obessed with the spotlight. Obviously he is intimidated by Elena's having any dreams or friends aside from him and was trying to put her down manipulatively, but still. Me? I was the first person to ever alert this girl to the fact that she was hot in highschool, one of the only people who believed her that she'd get over her bipolar for years, her best friend threw every single dramatic storm she went through even when it was directed tragically at me, and more fiercely loyal to her than I ever have been to anyone else. I even forgave her for thinking for three years that I stopped being friends with her to get back together with Blair (they didn't like each other when they frist met because Elena was so possessive over me and Blair really thought we were gay together for a while)- only to leave my life the second Rob dropped in last summer, claiming she'd been needing a break for a long time because I got so mean, even though she read everything on Lyme there was to read with me and knew I hadn't meant to act so unstable toward everyone. Elena is also the only one whose stood by me through most of my life so far, the one who screamed at anyone and everyone who disbelieved me about being sick when I first started losing weight and peeing blood and getting too weak to get out of bed, the one who tries to save all my loves from going by the wayside, the one who shoved my Lyme test in our friends' faces when they all turned their back on me for a while and helped me demand to doctors I be tested for bone marrow cancer as well all these months. I understand most of what was really going on between us when she fell in love with Rob now, but the wound came back full force when I heard her say out loud what I already knew Rob thought of me. I relate to Elena more than anyone but Blair and more than I do him in so many ways because she is my sister in this world, but she is going through sheer hell trying to satisfy her dependent boyfriend- whom, by the way, I was right in sensing did not want Elena to be my friend anymore. And even though Elena swears she would never give me up as a friend, I sense another loss between us in the near future like a waterfall rushing through my life and washing out shattered pieces of our old friendship. It really makes me feel heartbroken, so when Elena drove over this afternoon I decided to tell her I didn't want to start hanging out everytome Rob wasn't home or become super close again fast. Elena is always like my sister and I could never see myself truly losing her or never speaking to her again in this life for any reason. But I also don't want to get my feelings crushed, my heart totally broken, and so many things I believed about my life destoyed because I think we're friends for life and then she ditches me completely. I don't get close to many people and sometimes I feel truly lost and alone in this world, as if I'm frozen in my life while the rest of this earth spins toward the future. So when I do meet someone who is truly kindred to me, that person becomes part of me and my world. And that relationship shapes who I am as life goes on, progressing into the many different shapes it does and changing colors with me through the kalleidescope of seasons. I can count the number of men I've dated on one hand, and all four of them were people I immediately recognized as kindred spirits with whom I shared whole lives worth of unspoken history, shadows and ghosts that made me feel very old upon remembering at the sight of these guys. Elena is one of my kindred women, and although the feelings are purely friendship I definitely fear abandonment. And anytime a close female friend leaves my life for a relationship with a controlling guy, for some reason my world comes down around me and I really am that lost, insignificant little girl my mother used to say would never be pretty or feminine or sexual in any way, too shameful and creepy a little freak too ever be worthy of anything normal people did. (If anyone new is reading this, by the way: Yes, my mother talked to her toddler about sex and yes, I know how fucked-up and creepy that is. Just clarifying since this is my dirty public tell-all journal loll). Anyway, I don't want to be that girl ever again because although I've sought my whole life to escape her and have come so very far, that grotesque little inhuman, non-sexual freak my mother claimed to see in the hell of my childhood is still lurking. It is so uncharacteristic of me to own a real living emotional phobia inside of me, yet that bruised, shamed, and darkened little girl sets my life on the fire of pain anytime I fear or feel myself losing Elena. I know how creepy this sounds, but Elena is a caretaking type and when I was a teenager Elena's friendship replaced my mother's affection when I wasn't looking. It's ironic because I never lean on her in a way anyone outside could see and she has often worried about me in the past for being so closed and alone that maybe no one could reach my realm or understand me anymore- and for a few months last summer when I was too ill to leave the house we lived in together, I had feared that too.
That was right around when she met Rob and I told John he would never have another chance with me again, and I had felt like the only single freak who actually wanted to be alone in the world. I really, truly hated myself then with a passion that wiped people and possible directions out of my life like yesterday's rainy wind; and when Elena stopped trying to reach me and started planning her life with Rob, I all but died myself, knowing I hadn't acted like I cared about her before yet expecting her to know she was the most important person in my life because everyone knows I don't say mushy things out loud. In the midst of that had come the return of Blair, crying on my bed for a chance that felt somehow totally different from the ones he's been asking for since we were eighteen and I'd thought I moved on, then ditching me in a millisecond for drugs and Kelly when I said I was only able to be friends with him. My life was a tornado amidst which I was only sure of one thing: that when the pieces of it settled and fit my past would be totally over and I'd be a new, cleansed person with a bright future ahead despite an illness rearing its ugly head. I had thought I was crazy to think that my life falling apart at the seams and such ugly truths revealed from the core of it during a time of dangerous heath chaos could produce anything but sad gray death and the decay of my lost soul.
But I was right- I did become who I wanted to be in the ugly face of everything I cherished coming down around me like an avalanche of doom, the antithesis of everything I'd ever believed about my life. And I did make peace, at the very least spiritually, with the lights in my life who truly matter. And I discovered from within the core of me the things- and people- I truly want out of this life. I keep thinking about Blair lately, how old a soul he is despite some of his crazy actions, how he almost always believes he's standing up for what's right even when he really lets his emotions or bad self-esteem lead him into dark places. I know he's done some God-awful things he's always babbling on dogmatically about needing forgiveness from above for and that he has a true addiction. But overall he's pure and just tired from life and maybe the soul I know best in this world. I know his real roots and he knows mine, and lately I see such concrete iamges sprung from the dark that we will end up together in years. He's got some trouble in his soul and conflicts about directions in his life, and I have some years to go before I can be well enough physically and emotionally to be someone's permanent love, and we both need to get well physically. But I see us as the ones who will grow old together in the end. I went to the edge of my life a couple months ago- couldn't leave my house for some time because the tremors and fevers were so random and intense; my heart would palpitate so viciously that I'd faint from the strength it took to drive- and it was Blair's voice on the phone confident that I would live that made me begin to believe the same. It was Blair whose hand over my heart that made it stop skipping beats and seem to collapse painfully into my chest; that sure, level presence in my heart and over my shoulder that made me see a life worth coming back to if I ever did black out for more than a few seconds when the chest pains or fevers came. We fight and we fight over the course of years, but anytime I'm in need it's always him there to help me pick up my pieces and believe in my lifeline when so many others turn their backs and leave me behind. Lately I think of so many holes in my world from the absence of so many people I thought or dreamed would always be there forming the circle of my life, like both my parents and many girl friends or ex-boyfriends I loved more deeply than I loved breathing. So many people come and go, some talking aching pieces of me with them when they leave my world forever.
But as I grow and see the sun set victoriously in my life as the world begins for the first time to open up for me, the fog on the windshield clears. And I realize the few souls whom I can't and would not want to live without. And I see myself getting married in time to the soul who fills me up over the years even when we're apart, whose pains I share and joys I anticipate no matter whom they're with, the only one thus far for me. If I meet someone new and he's better for me or more stable in my life and Blair does the same, I will make sure I am happy for the way things went because only God knows what's best for us in this world. But right now I'm feeling a culmination of two souls like I've never felt before, and I know that he loves me too. I will be a different woman when this change I'm tunneling through has wrecked my life to ancient pieces. I have begun to piece it back together again completely, this time rooted in the sun. There will be no more repulsion and retraction into darkness when the one I love asks me if I think I could see myself spending the rest of my life with him, and gone will be the childish fears and mean old mother's voice in my ears, ringing out from all sides of my world whenever something good happens to me. No more visits from the ugly duckling I used to be and no more tears flooding my world to chase out the gold with the dirt. I have not yet been able to tell a man to his face that I love him for life and want to commit to a relationship. Not since I was a kid with Blair, and of course it didn't mean what it did now. Although I did love Blair then, anything I said when I was sixteen meant "get me out of my mother's space and fuck me." Someday I will be whole enough to say it out of bed and mean it. And when that day comes my whole life up to that point will have been an ocean, and I will have made it to the shore, and the sun will set and if I have my way I'll be standing next to Blair, and the entire new lives we both have ahead of us will spread out and over the dunes, and the light from the setting ball of fire in the sky will shine down on new skin, and it won't be happily ever after but it will be the most perfect piece of the world two people can possibly carve from pasts like ours, and so of course in my soul it will be the most beautiful story anyone could have written. I want that love to be a shrine because he has been my best friend besides Elena in this world, and as I become whole within myself I add pieces to that work of art. Although I would never say it to his face now, I want Blair to know deep down that my dream is that we end up together when we're both whole in ourselves. I don't want any man to dream I wouldn't be okay without him because that just isn't true, but I do dream of the day when I can show Blair the woman I really am under all the layers of cold in my world, beneath all the issues and obsessive anxiety over emotions and the future.
Once when we had a particularly cruel fight, I told Blair I never once took the notion of marrying him seriously or him with more than a grain of salt because he was obviously going to be an addict for life. In turn he'd told me that he knew I never loved him anyway, and it was just an ego-based obsession that made me mad over his relationship with his ex. He'd out me down on the phone in front of his mother, and when I hung up the phone that day I felt like I was hanging up on an entire friendship and closing the curtain on the only love that ever had a pulse for me. Giving up on Blair and feeling him give up on me had felt like giving up most of myself, and after that I began to live without really living. My world had turned to black because it felt so unnatural that Blair would really want me out of his life even as a friend, and there was only a small tunnel of oxygen to breathe from in the circles of motions I went through. I was terribly confused inside, maybe more than I ever have been in my whole life, because I know how to let go of people when they're not meant to be around. I may call a thousand times spewing angry things and swearing a person will never live me down because I have too much pride and have been hurt too many times to let it go easily, but the moment all contact is cut I take a deep breath and never look back. Once I make a decision it's usually final, too. When Blair hurt me at sixteen I resolved never to take him back or even make out with him again and I kept my vow to myself for three years until I decided that breaking it might be more beneficial. When I finally kissed him again, he'd wholly proved his loyalty to me as a friend and it warmed my cold heart to taste my old friend in a new place in time. I saw the sun and thought briefly that someday I wanted a family after all, and then it was over and I held him off for another year. During that year he met Kelly and I cried inside a lot alone, but never once out loud to anyone and not more than twice in actual tears. I mourned all my energy out over Jason then fell in love with John, and Blair told me both his undying love and doubts about his future with Kelly. It was all okay because I was nowhere near ready for a commitment and didn't want to deal with drugs. During that time he would ask me out and say he would leave his girlfriend is I said yes, but I felt that he loved her and had more time on his path with her, so I swallowed my flame and wished him luck with her. I would not see him alone, though, and once Elena came with me to steal him away from the world he shared with that girl in a dingy Ewing apartment. He'd looked tired and mean and off-track somehow, but gorgeous and my old best friend nonethless, so we went out to eat like always. And he always complained to Elena about how he wanted to get married but didn't know to whom it would work best with, and Elena always asked him if he'd ever want to marry me. The answer was always an mortifyingly obnoxious "yes, we definitely will if she wants to and could just stop judging my HEROIN addiction and worrying about my HEPATITIS", and I really never wanted to go out in public again. And he knew it and he smirked at me like the asshole he always acted like during that time, and Elena said we should just at least fuck already all the way home. I wanted to, but patience is my virtue and I know how better than many how to wait for good things.
Lately I've been thinking about all the good things I have waited for that are just now beginning to take shape, and I pray and meditate everyday with Elena's help that my life is long enough for me to enjoy the fruits of my labor. But I get so lonely sometimes, and the fire of my old envy returns whenever I think Elena is going to leave me like my mother and other women in my life have for a man. I am almost unafraid of everything emotional this world can throw at me now, but losing Elena because she cared more about keeping a guy than me after I put most of my life's energy thus far into being her friend would make me enraged like the child I used to be. I lost faith in life when we first stopped being friends and I was sure it was about Rob. I felt angry and deranged and for weeks I had sexually perverse thoughts about screwing anything that walks, fiending for this bleak world and everyone I used to love in it to see I am not everybody's proverial good girl, needing Elena and her stupid trademark possessive idiot of a boyfriend to see I'm not some soft lost girl who was too badly damaged by her past to fall in love, to see that love was dead to me and all that was left of me was a dying body, anyway. She didn't have a past like me, I would think. She left me to fuck some guy just like my mother did, and John thought I was craxy because I acted it, and almost every other soul in this world was too lonely and cheap and easy to buy for me to even feign interest anyway. There was no more depth outside my own mind, and I knew I was too impaired to handle human touch even if it had been offered, which is definitely wasn't at that time last summer. I hated myself so much that it was haunting and miserable to even try to look in mirrors. I straightened my hait without them and poured out my life in blue words on this public journal rather than tears. I was not strong enough to see my heart break, and if I cried about being betrayed by Elena I knew I'd remember that everything I ever believed was shattered, and I'd fall apart in front of this whole world. I was living a quiet life with my father in a dingy gray tralier trash place by the shore because I was forced by health issues to give up my own apartment in California. Although a part of me thanked God for a chance to fall apart and lose my life where no one could see it blow away with the ocean winds, the rest of me hurt because nothing could be worse than dying alone near the Jersey Shore- or even worse, under the roof of yet another woman who hated me and yelled, "Fake slut!" when I rolled out of bed too late to do the dishes on time. (My father has really upstanding taste in women, by the way. Sarcastic.) And I was really scared I was going to die right away, because my joints and head hurt so badly I almost wanted to die, none of my doctors could figure out why my throat was chronically infected and my limbs gave out on me sometimes, the weight was coming off as easily as the days were fading from me, I had so many fevers, and I got dizzy and felt like my tongue was too swollen for my mouth and my vision went double at night, and sometimes the weight on my chest was so heavy and my heart skipped so many beats that I just laid in my car feeling lost and prayed for God to take me. "I know I was supposed to have a long life", I would say inside, "but apparently when I came into this world I had no idea what it would be like to be deathly sick without family who knows I'm alive, so please take me before things can get anymore like a horror movie. If illness is going to take me, I want to be in control of when I go." But then a warm embrace would never fail to cover my pained body no matter where I pulled over to faint while my heart thumped painfully, and a stolid but simple voice would surge into my ears. "I'm sorry, but you're not going to die yet. I know you miss it at home. But soon things will get easier, you cannot imagine how much. You'll love youself more by the winter, start treatment by next summer, your career will begin, and you will get married. By the time all this is in motion you're heart will be healthy again and you will hardly notice the aches and pains." The voice always sounded like nature, like the wind whipping through the world, like Mother God, and I slowly sat up and began to drive. I thought I had finally gone crazy. But if I was crazy, then at least when you were crazy you had God inside you.
I used to think that I was crazy, but now I read the things they said about every innovative thinker in history and realize that in this world most of the crazy ones are the most sane.
Some of it is trivial, like knowing my reading would be postponed till a later date and knowing I'd be well enough to go to my photo shoot..and even knowing that although I lost my breath enough to faint in the car and when I came to my heart burned and palpitated too much to utter a word the other day , I was not having a heart attack, and would actually feel better in the afternoon. Or I'll know really mundane things like the weather. But aside from the trivial, I realized once I found my center that my lifeline is long and I'm definitely going to get married and perform in the future, so long as I find a way to get my late stage Lyme disease and other health problems treated so that they are no longer dangerous to my life. If the bloodwork that's been abnormal since I first lost my insurance really didn't lie and I do have a bone marrow cancer, I have realized that I won't even accept it if the top doctor in the whole damn country tells me I have two months to live from having it undetected so long. I would not feel, touch, and see the that holy bread of my future if it wasn't really ahead of me. Lately whenever I intuit the damage to my organs from being sick so long and the dangers that lie ahead (or even when I just let the black nightmare of my worst fears take hold of me), I sit in the dark and meditate on the past I've left behind that has made me who I am, and the future I hold like a folded map inside me now. The dark I sit quietly within in is new and scary, but the house I grew up in is bathed in a whole new light to me and my mother's hatred of me has almost all but ceased to affect my soul. I know I will not be living here much longer. I will soon not belong to these walls. Sometimes I literally see myself being released from the peach tile and dim yellow shadows that live in these walls, for those old memories no longer shape me. I am my own, and the stale angry lights of the past have begun to hang golden in new showers over me even though my mother is more hateful than ever. She even told me the other day that she hated me now but would happily take care of me when they put me on hospice. When, not if, mind you. My heart broke in a million little pieces and I cried because the woman who is supposed to feel like my mother would rather see me dead than happy and free and successful in spite of the hell she did to me. My house looked gray and I felt lost in it, but a voice loud enough to encompass my whole world spoke directly into me so that I could not have disbelieved its presence if I wanted to. It said that soon I would be gone from here, that I wasn't going to die from this bout of illness, and my life was starting totally new. And then my heart was filled with and transformed by so much love within the few seconds the light of my future flashed before me that I could not care less if my mother can't truly love. The hurt may always be with me, insuniating itself into the cement cracks of my life path all the way through to the end and making it so very hard to have relationships, for there is always a black hole of lonely space in me where my mother hated me and all my loved ones' mothers didn't. The experience of being brutalized physically and spiritually through childhood has made me whole, but is has also made me tired, cynical, and impatient with most men. I am a natural loner who is more than content just enjoying the lone space of myself and writing my poetic history, enjoying trips to bookstores or lingerie shops in the company of only myself during my much loathed (though admittedly much-needed) medical leave from my job. It's almost like there are two of us, I enjoy my own company so much these days.
No one else I know is like that except for Elena's sister Anna. None of my friends would turn down the person she loved all her life to meditate on becoming more whole and enjoy the sheer bliss of independence and hard-earned good self-esteem. Being in my own company when I fully like myself is almost like making the best friend I ever had in this world- or even meeting God in a sense, because I would not be this full, internally satisfied person if I had not realized that God is the sheer, absolute center of even this crazy world. But since no one else I know likes being alone as much as I do and a romantic relationship is the center of most of my friends' worlds, I am suddenly aware that there is a barren place in me that cannot relate to anyone else I know. It's endlessly lonely despite that I AM a loner, because I'm still human and need people I can relate to! You'd think no that I've finally accepted that I'm happy with my chosen lifestyle would make me happy- and it does- but it also makes me sadder and more lonely than I've ever been in my life. I do want a steady relationship in the future, but if I really couldn't have one the disappointment would probably not even put a dent in my world. I have no friends who share my stance in life, and so a part of me feels one hundred percent alone and untouched. Some days it brings me down, down, down below everyone else and my mood just feels terribly off, especially around Elena. I think it's because I really think I mean so much less to her than Rob does, and today she confirmed my suspicions that he doesn't like her being friends with me. Supposedly Elena told him I got a photographer to take pictures of her since she wants to try and do some plus-sized modeling, and he snapped that I'm one of those catty girls who only wants to "steal her thunder." Elena was telling me crying that he says my intentions are not what they seem and TRUST HIM, I know that if we went for the same career I'd get all the gigs and success because I'm skinny and obessed with the spotlight. Obviously he is intimidated by Elena's having any dreams or friends aside from him and was trying to put her down manipulatively, but still. Me? I was the first person to ever alert this girl to the fact that she was hot in highschool, one of the only people who believed her that she'd get over her bipolar for years, her best friend threw every single dramatic storm she went through even when it was directed tragically at me, and more fiercely loyal to her than I ever have been to anyone else. I even forgave her for thinking for three years that I stopped being friends with her to get back together with Blair (they didn't like each other when they frist met because Elena was so possessive over me and Blair really thought we were gay together for a while)- only to leave my life the second Rob dropped in last summer, claiming she'd been needing a break for a long time because I got so mean, even though she read everything on Lyme there was to read with me and knew I hadn't meant to act so unstable toward everyone. Elena is also the only one whose stood by me through most of my life so far, the one who screamed at anyone and everyone who disbelieved me about being sick when I first started losing weight and peeing blood and getting too weak to get out of bed, the one who tries to save all my loves from going by the wayside, the one who shoved my Lyme test in our friends' faces when they all turned their back on me for a while and helped me demand to doctors I be tested for bone marrow cancer as well all these months. I understand most of what was really going on between us when she fell in love with Rob now, but the wound came back full force when I heard her say out loud what I already knew Rob thought of me. I relate to Elena more than anyone but Blair and more than I do him in so many ways because she is my sister in this world, but she is going through sheer hell trying to satisfy her dependent boyfriend- whom, by the way, I was right in sensing did not want Elena to be my friend anymore. And even though Elena swears she would never give me up as a friend, I sense another loss between us in the near future like a waterfall rushing through my life and washing out shattered pieces of our old friendship. It really makes me feel heartbroken, so when Elena drove over this afternoon I decided to tell her I didn't want to start hanging out everytome Rob wasn't home or become super close again fast. Elena is always like my sister and I could never see myself truly losing her or never speaking to her again in this life for any reason. But I also don't want to get my feelings crushed, my heart totally broken, and so many things I believed about my life destoyed because I think we're friends for life and then she ditches me completely. I don't get close to many people and sometimes I feel truly lost and alone in this world, as if I'm frozen in my life while the rest of this earth spins toward the future. So when I do meet someone who is truly kindred to me, that person becomes part of me and my world. And that relationship shapes who I am as life goes on, progressing into the many different shapes it does and changing colors with me through the kalleidescope of seasons. I can count the number of men I've dated on one hand, and all four of them were people I immediately recognized as kindred spirits with whom I shared whole lives worth of unspoken history, shadows and ghosts that made me feel very old upon remembering at the sight of these guys. Elena is one of my kindred women, and although the feelings are purely friendship I definitely fear abandonment. And anytime a close female friend leaves my life for a relationship with a controlling guy, for some reason my world comes down around me and I really am that lost, insignificant little girl my mother used to say would never be pretty or feminine or sexual in any way, too shameful and creepy a little freak too ever be worthy of anything normal people did. (If anyone new is reading this, by the way: Yes, my mother talked to her toddler about sex and yes, I know how fucked-up and creepy that is. Just clarifying since this is my dirty public tell-all journal loll). Anyway, I don't want to be that girl ever again because although I've sought my whole life to escape her and have come so very far, that grotesque little inhuman, non-sexual freak my mother claimed to see in the hell of my childhood is still lurking. It is so uncharacteristic of me to own a real living emotional phobia inside of me, yet that bruised, shamed, and darkened little girl sets my life on the fire of pain anytime I fear or feel myself losing Elena. I know how creepy this sounds, but Elena is a caretaking type and when I was a teenager Elena's friendship replaced my mother's affection when I wasn't looking. It's ironic because I never lean on her in a way anyone outside could see and she has often worried about me in the past for being so closed and alone that maybe no one could reach my realm or understand me anymore- and for a few months last summer when I was too ill to leave the house we lived in together, I had feared that too.
That was right around when she met Rob and I told John he would never have another chance with me again, and I had felt like the only single freak who actually wanted to be alone in the world. I really, truly hated myself then with a passion that wiped people and possible directions out of my life like yesterday's rainy wind; and when Elena stopped trying to reach me and started planning her life with Rob, I all but died myself, knowing I hadn't acted like I cared about her before yet expecting her to know she was the most important person in my life because everyone knows I don't say mushy things out loud. In the midst of that had come the return of Blair, crying on my bed for a chance that felt somehow totally different from the ones he's been asking for since we were eighteen and I'd thought I moved on, then ditching me in a millisecond for drugs and Kelly when I said I was only able to be friends with him. My life was a tornado amidst which I was only sure of one thing: that when the pieces of it settled and fit my past would be totally over and I'd be a new, cleansed person with a bright future ahead despite an illness rearing its ugly head. I had thought I was crazy to think that my life falling apart at the seams and such ugly truths revealed from the core of it during a time of dangerous heath chaos could produce anything but sad gray death and the decay of my lost soul.
But I was right- I did become who I wanted to be in the ugly face of everything I cherished coming down around me like an avalanche of doom, the antithesis of everything I'd ever believed about my life. And I did make peace, at the very least spiritually, with the lights in my life who truly matter. And I discovered from within the core of me the things- and people- I truly want out of this life. I keep thinking about Blair lately, how old a soul he is despite some of his crazy actions, how he almost always believes he's standing up for what's right even when he really lets his emotions or bad self-esteem lead him into dark places. I know he's done some God-awful things he's always babbling on dogmatically about needing forgiveness from above for and that he has a true addiction. But overall he's pure and just tired from life and maybe the soul I know best in this world. I know his real roots and he knows mine, and lately I see such concrete iamges sprung from the dark that we will end up together in years. He's got some trouble in his soul and conflicts about directions in his life, and I have some years to go before I can be well enough physically and emotionally to be someone's permanent love, and we both need to get well physically. But I see us as the ones who will grow old together in the end. I went to the edge of my life a couple months ago- couldn't leave my house for some time because the tremors and fevers were so random and intense; my heart would palpitate so viciously that I'd faint from the strength it took to drive- and it was Blair's voice on the phone confident that I would live that made me begin to believe the same. It was Blair whose hand over my heart that made it stop skipping beats and seem to collapse painfully into my chest; that sure, level presence in my heart and over my shoulder that made me see a life worth coming back to if I ever did black out for more than a few seconds when the chest pains or fevers came. We fight and we fight over the course of years, but anytime I'm in need it's always him there to help me pick up my pieces and believe in my lifeline when so many others turn their backs and leave me behind. Lately I think of so many holes in my world from the absence of so many people I thought or dreamed would always be there forming the circle of my life, like both my parents and many girl friends or ex-boyfriends I loved more deeply than I loved breathing. So many people come and go, some talking aching pieces of me with them when they leave my world forever.
But as I grow and see the sun set victoriously in my life as the world begins for the first time to open up for me, the fog on the windshield clears. And I realize the few souls whom I can't and would not want to live without. And I see myself getting married in time to the soul who fills me up over the years even when we're apart, whose pains I share and joys I anticipate no matter whom they're with, the only one thus far for me. If I meet someone new and he's better for me or more stable in my life and Blair does the same, I will make sure I am happy for the way things went because only God knows what's best for us in this world. But right now I'm feeling a culmination of two souls like I've never felt before, and I know that he loves me too. I will be a different woman when this change I'm tunneling through has wrecked my life to ancient pieces. I have begun to piece it back together again completely, this time rooted in the sun. There will be no more repulsion and retraction into darkness when the one I love asks me if I think I could see myself spending the rest of my life with him, and gone will be the childish fears and mean old mother's voice in my ears, ringing out from all sides of my world whenever something good happens to me. No more visits from the ugly duckling I used to be and no more tears flooding my world to chase out the gold with the dirt. I have not yet been able to tell a man to his face that I love him for life and want to commit to a relationship. Not since I was a kid with Blair, and of course it didn't mean what it did now. Although I did love Blair then, anything I said when I was sixteen meant "get me out of my mother's space and fuck me." Someday I will be whole enough to say it out of bed and mean it. And when that day comes my whole life up to that point will have been an ocean, and I will have made it to the shore, and the sun will set and if I have my way I'll be standing next to Blair, and the entire new lives we both have ahead of us will spread out and over the dunes, and the light from the setting ball of fire in the sky will shine down on new skin, and it won't be happily ever after but it will be the most perfect piece of the world two people can possibly carve from pasts like ours, and so of course in my soul it will be the most beautiful story anyone could have written. I want that love to be a shrine because he has been my best friend besides Elena in this world, and as I become whole within myself I add pieces to that work of art. Although I would never say it to his face now, I want Blair to know deep down that my dream is that we end up together when we're both whole in ourselves. I don't want any man to dream I wouldn't be okay without him because that just isn't true, but I do dream of the day when I can show Blair the woman I really am under all the layers of cold in my world, beneath all the issues and obsessive anxiety over emotions and the future.
Once when we had a particularly cruel fight, I told Blair I never once took the notion of marrying him seriously or him with more than a grain of salt because he was obviously going to be an addict for life. In turn he'd told me that he knew I never loved him anyway, and it was just an ego-based obsession that made me mad over his relationship with his ex. He'd out me down on the phone in front of his mother, and when I hung up the phone that day I felt like I was hanging up on an entire friendship and closing the curtain on the only love that ever had a pulse for me. Giving up on Blair and feeling him give up on me had felt like giving up most of myself, and after that I began to live without really living. My world had turned to black because it felt so unnatural that Blair would really want me out of his life even as a friend, and there was only a small tunnel of oxygen to breathe from in the circles of motions I went through. I was terribly confused inside, maybe more than I ever have been in my whole life, because I know how to let go of people when they're not meant to be around. I may call a thousand times spewing angry things and swearing a person will never live me down because I have too much pride and have been hurt too many times to let it go easily, but the moment all contact is cut I take a deep breath and never look back. Once I make a decision it's usually final, too. When Blair hurt me at sixteen I resolved never to take him back or even make out with him again and I kept my vow to myself for three years until I decided that breaking it might be more beneficial. When I finally kissed him again, he'd wholly proved his loyalty to me as a friend and it warmed my cold heart to taste my old friend in a new place in time. I saw the sun and thought briefly that someday I wanted a family after all, and then it was over and I held him off for another year. During that year he met Kelly and I cried inside a lot alone, but never once out loud to anyone and not more than twice in actual tears. I mourned all my energy out over Jason then fell in love with John, and Blair told me both his undying love and doubts about his future with Kelly. It was all okay because I was nowhere near ready for a commitment and didn't want to deal with drugs. During that time he would ask me out and say he would leave his girlfriend is I said yes, but I felt that he loved her and had more time on his path with her, so I swallowed my flame and wished him luck with her. I would not see him alone, though, and once Elena came with me to steal him away from the world he shared with that girl in a dingy Ewing apartment. He'd looked tired and mean and off-track somehow, but gorgeous and my old best friend nonethless, so we went out to eat like always. And he always complained to Elena about how he wanted to get married but didn't know to whom it would work best with, and Elena always asked him if he'd ever want to marry me. The answer was always an mortifyingly obnoxious "yes, we definitely will if she wants to and could just stop judging my HEROIN addiction and worrying about my HEPATITIS", and I really never wanted to go out in public again. And he knew it and he smirked at me like the asshole he always acted like during that time, and Elena said we should just at least fuck already all the way home. I wanted to, but patience is my virtue and I know how better than many how to wait for good things.
Lately I've been thinking about all the good things I have waited for that are just now beginning to take shape, and I pray and meditate everyday with Elena's help that my life is long enough for me to enjoy the fruits of my labor. But I get so lonely sometimes, and the fire of my old envy returns whenever I think Elena is going to leave me like my mother and other women in my life have for a man. I am almost unafraid of everything emotional this world can throw at me now, but losing Elena because she cared more about keeping a guy than me after I put most of my life's energy thus far into being her friend would make me enraged like the child I used to be. I lost faith in life when we first stopped being friends and I was sure it was about Rob. I felt angry and deranged and for weeks I had sexually perverse thoughts about screwing anything that walks, fiending for this bleak world and everyone I used to love in it to see I am not everybody's proverial good girl, needing Elena and her stupid trademark possessive idiot of a boyfriend to see I'm not some soft lost girl who was too badly damaged by her past to fall in love, to see that love was dead to me and all that was left of me was a dying body, anyway. She didn't have a past like me, I would think. She left me to fuck some guy just like my mother did, and John thought I was craxy because I acted it, and almost every other soul in this world was too lonely and cheap and easy to buy for me to even feign interest anyway. There was no more depth outside my own mind, and I knew I was too impaired to handle human touch even if it had been offered, which is definitely wasn't at that time last summer. I hated myself so much that it was haunting and miserable to even try to look in mirrors. I straightened my hait without them and poured out my life in blue words on this public journal rather than tears. I was not strong enough to see my heart break, and if I cried about being betrayed by Elena I knew I'd remember that everything I ever believed was shattered, and I'd fall apart in front of this whole world. I was living a quiet life with my father in a dingy gray tralier trash place by the shore because I was forced by health issues to give up my own apartment in California. Although a part of me thanked God for a chance to fall apart and lose my life where no one could see it blow away with the ocean winds, the rest of me hurt because nothing could be worse than dying alone near the Jersey Shore- or even worse, under the roof of yet another woman who hated me and yelled, "Fake slut!" when I rolled out of bed too late to do the dishes on time. (My father has really upstanding taste in women, by the way. Sarcastic.) And I was really scared I was going to die right away, because my joints and head hurt so badly I almost wanted to die, none of my doctors could figure out why my throat was chronically infected and my limbs gave out on me sometimes, the weight was coming off as easily as the days were fading from me, I had so many fevers, and I got dizzy and felt like my tongue was too swollen for my mouth and my vision went double at night, and sometimes the weight on my chest was so heavy and my heart skipped so many beats that I just laid in my car feeling lost and prayed for God to take me. "I know I was supposed to have a long life", I would say inside, "but apparently when I came into this world I had no idea what it would be like to be deathly sick without family who knows I'm alive, so please take me before things can get anymore like a horror movie. If illness is going to take me, I want to be in control of when I go." But then a warm embrace would never fail to cover my pained body no matter where I pulled over to faint while my heart thumped painfully, and a stolid but simple voice would surge into my ears. "I'm sorry, but you're not going to die yet. I know you miss it at home. But soon things will get easier, you cannot imagine how much. You'll love youself more by the winter, start treatment by next summer, your career will begin, and you will get married. By the time all this is in motion you're heart will be healthy again and you will hardly notice the aches and pains." The voice always sounded like nature, like the wind whipping through the world, like Mother God, and I slowly sat up and began to drive. I thought I had finally gone crazy. But if I was crazy, then at least when you were crazy you had God inside you.
I used to think that I was crazy, but now I read the things they said about every innovative thinker in history and realize that in this world most of the crazy ones are the most sane.