The Sleepwalker
The past two days have been a blur of lethargy and frozen time. I can never really predict anymore when my mind will be clear and when it will look like a blazing red, dusty twillight; I don't even really try anymore to stretch my mind ahead when it hurts. I just sleep. Ever since my reading with Chris Defresne, I have been allowing myself to sleep when a hole seems to open up in my exhausted body, calling for the rest it needs. Sleep is a hole that my whole body and self falls through when I let myself lie down, and it makes me feel dead while it restarts my mind. The sweet thing about actual rest is that I become one with myself and time as a whole when I'm coccooned into that little black ball called sleep, almost as if my limbs and thoughts are have really left me to pull into one dead mass. Sometimes it really does reprogram my mind to start a new day rather than just continue flowing from a constant old river of hollow black sleepless memories wherein my eyes feel frozen open like quarters; sometimes all the memories and fears I seek to gather into an answer in the waking hours all flow downstream and settle in the pit of my stomache, where all is magically calm and secure.
Other times, sleep is not so good. First of all, it's hard to attain due to both spiritual and physical troubles in my heart. Last night the skipped beats and chest pains culminated in such an intense pinpoint pressure in the center of my heart that I lost my breath if I laid down, and if I had had a surreal doubt that it was really happening, all I had to do was touch my neck. Pins and needles, just like the black static of sleep is as I struggle to begin embarking on the path to wellness and stand at the edge of the cliff that is the first chapter of my life thus far. My heart aches in more ways than one, and though I am now cleansed of any disease that isn't medical, both types of heart pain seem to stream together, one instigating the other. The monster of my heart pain usually flares most at night, when the world is dark and the night looks like leather outside. First there's the all-encompassingly painful sensation that a weight the size of the world is resting on my chest, and then come the skipped beats. It can happen at a time when I'm totally calm, but it's always worsened by worry. My worries are killers and they eat my life alive until it feels like nothing more than a dark ghost of what it used to be- till I feel I have rotted myself. Lately I try hard not to take the whole vision I have in my soul of my life down piece by piece, scrutinizing and analyzing my plan until all that's left seems to be half a weathered soul and faded pieces of paper. In a way my life feels like that anyway, though. Is this what happens when the first chapter of one's life is so wholly eventful? I've already been through hell and back, my soul having survived ruthless abuse and then mental illness; I found the true love that felt like the center of my life then lost it, discovering myself if the process; I hated myself with the fires of hell until my life was almost burned away; I then got sick and was bedridden, broken into a million little pieces- all those shattered pieces of my life turning inside out at my touch as I reexamined breath I've ever taken; and alas, I have found myself. And I love that person. But I'm wiped out by a tidal wave of exhaustion, and my quiet days in the company of my own aura with coffee and books are the humble hiatus God has given to me from above so that I might find what it takes to get well and start all anew. It feels like just me and the cold whistle of the winter winds now out here.
The other problem with sleep is that a long night of it doesn't refresh me, but makes me groggy inside. Sleep is deadly and deep in the sense once I let it in, it stays like a dark hole inside of me and it doesn't want to let me go. If I'm gruesomely, horrifyingly honest with myself, a part of me is wont to divorce my marriage to physical and emotional exhaustion as well. Being a sleepwalker in a muffled world turned upside down has its advantages; I'm not someone who easily handles raw emotion and walking through the world as if I'm made of warm rubber doesn't leave much room for feelings. I'm so tired that I'm gasping for even a hole of oxygen and clarity to open up in the sky and let me continue on the weathered road I travel, which up till now has been easy to tell myself is because of the illness. I know that exhaustion comes with the territory of having a sickness, but must it be the black mask I show the world and myself when I look in the mirror? Sometimes I can't help how God-awfully tired I am; chronic bodily pain, chills, sweats, and various colds all melded into one monstrous tangle inside one's chest cavity will do that. But what Chris said was that it's not an excuse to slip into the darknessof my life. He said I have to wake up now in order to get well. He told me that if I do everything he said, I'll look back at this in several years and say, "What a crazy trip that was!" That's literally what he said, even as he read aloud almost my entire list of symptoms. I've got to tap my soul and tell my body it's had its rest and it's time for me to live my life. A part of me is sad to try and wake my poor soul from this dream, because although it's black and aimless it's also the first time I've ever really slept in my whole life.
I mused over this today as I searched for jobs in the thinning, darkening day alongside my mother. The whole day seemed to thin indeed as I had one of the only meaningful conversations I had with my mother in a long time. We talked about goodbyes and the end of loves and her new man and my plans for California. The sweet, clear blue sky felt like a new one, but the sunny clouds frosted the day like the icing of a million sweet old memories. I had to shut my eyes to them and see black to avoid thinking of all the times I'd rode to Hooters with Elena last spring, and even the crystal clear loving days I spent in that town with Tony for two years. Those two years were perhaps the most innocent I'd ever had in my life; though Tony was more like family to me than a man I was in love with, our bond was deep and we were intrinsically woven into each other's existances for a long time. Oozingly, almost painfully sweet, wide-eyed Tony with the sunset in his watery gazes really brought out my innocence like no one else ever could, for better and worse. When I was with Tony, the world was always somewhat of a fairy tale or a magic carpet ride, held above the ground by dreams, so many of the truths that made us who were were disguised by cotton candy days like today conjured back to my mind. Reality was really a knife to that relationship, I suddenly recalled. To Tony, I was His Future Wife, frozen like the clear, cold winter days and the much older neighborhood ladies in the Scotch Plains area. One summer came I and dared to break the sad, eerie guise staring back at the mirror, barely squeexing into ome of my old short Holister skirts with a barely-there tank top. I didn't get his disapproval logically; all his friends at the firehouse had girlfriends that wore the same kinds of things. I told myself I didn't anymore because of the weight I'd gained, but the truth was that weight was just more ice and guards I'd built around myself because I wasn't happy being Tony's Girlfriend. I looked so gray and dead to myself in the mirror in a whole different, much more disturbing way than I do now to myself when I'm sick or down because of changes in my life. I was being someone I was not with Tony. When I dressed like Lindsay, it brought just a teensy, tiny piece of her back to life and I'd wanted to go dancing so I could feel the world come alive again for the first time in what felt like almost a whole lifetime since I'd become Tony's Woman. So we did- but not without me suffering dark, killer side glances all night then tears in his blue Mustang before he dropped me off. My outfit and the way I only tried to dance dirty with him when all our friends formed a crowd made him feel like there was a part of me I shared with the rest of the world that he wasn't allowed to know. I always triend telling him it wasn't true, but then the clouds settled in and I knew it was. I am a performer at heart, it makes me feel alive and connected when my skin shows, I dreamed of becoming an actress all my life, and it broke me in two to pretend I was someone else in an attempt to assauge at least the surface of Tony's chronic jealous wounds. It was always, "It makes me want to kill myself and realize I have a dark side when I can't reach you" and "I feel like you don't really enjoy yourself at the fireman's house parties, and if it's because the other girls there are skinny you can talk to me about your insecurities"- or my favorite, after two years of my being out of touch with Jason- "I bet you wouldn't hold back from Jason if he wanted to fuck you, I cry myself to sleep so many nights because I know you would go crazy on him." And I bet he would out his fingers through my hair like I was the only thing alive at that moment and sincerely compliment my body and actually love me for who I am, I'd wanted to say, but was frozen silent. I didn't know why I thought Jason would love me until he did after Tony and me were through. And at one point I would've given my life not to hurt Tony, because I really did love him so much that my life was wrapped bittersweetly around his, even though our history had bloomed from a dark place in the woods no one else knew; it was as if we'd grown from the same root of the earth, even if romance hadn't exactly my first instinct with him and never really became it over time. And he made me happy in so many ways no one else ever could, because he Tony and for a long time he was my best very friend. I thought today as my mother and me drove through the blinding new sun" Most things we go through in life are not all bad. And when they are, there is always a lesson learned and a gift to take on our way. I might feel a little lost right now, but I've been loved so many times in so many ways, and I have what it takes to face down the force of illness with that of a happy new day.
I smiled quietly to myself as my mother talked to me about how scared she was for a while that I was too sick to make it through, stunned silent by peace and sadness. Who would have thought she gave my life a second thought? And here she was worrying she'd be destroyed if I died. I closed my eyes and thought, "Oh my God, no matter what happens to me medically or how depressed I get, I can't disappoint the people I realized cared about me through all this awful mess.
I'm so warm inside, because I've reached the end of such a very weary, long road of suffering. And yet- so many people and places I've loved are gone, parts of me wiped out just like that. What if I am not strong enough to stomache the changes in my life? I suppose the real fear screaming in my gut is not that I'm not strong enough to silently withstand the cold and the ugly. I'm really not one to explode with change of season or the colors of what I feel inside when life is stunted or uprooted. I handle things too quietly, in fact. And that is what I'm so afraid of. That is what chases me inward with such great, encompassing fear. As it is, I numb all my emotions by default. I don't even mean to do it- I'm just so intense and emotional that I suspect it would be dangerous for me to feel at a time when my whole life up to this point has culminated to an bittersweet finale in the center of me. I'm angry and incomprehensibly sad about too many things to fit into the space of my world; I would go crazy, maybe, if I could feel. I've wanted to stick needles up my arm since I was barely born, a toddler or so. I chose at an early age between living my life wreckless or living it frozen, and my weary soul aches reassurance that I've kept my word. Perhaps if I let myself feel how sad I am that my first love- or at least the first chapter of it- is over, I would just fall to the floor and cry out the guts if all my memories. Nothing about doing that sounds even a morsel like relief to me. Elena used to tell me that anyone who knows me can tell I'm screaming inside all the time, but my world would move forward easily if I just let my emotions out sometimes. But how? If I dare to even touch the iceberg of them around other people, they don't begin to understand. To be fair, it' mostly because my painful inner core comes out in equations and analyzations when it's really ready to burst from the inside. I just can't cry in front of people, except for Blair and that's a whole other story.
This time in my life is really the end of so many parts of everything I've known thus far on my path in life. With that revelation has rushed in a deep d. What if I get lost inside these vast, nameless winter days? Or what if I take too many dark bullets on the insideese days I wake up into the world, but I'm sleeping and still inside for long stretches of time after a full night's sleep. As if a spell has wainto a mere goldfish in a tiny clear bubble tank, I long to taste and swallow a world that looks gray and endless from where I am. Sleep stretches out to cover the suddenly innately unfamch of my world in ice, and I see all the aces I know and love with a kind of stranger's eyes. It isn't so much that I'm totally disconnected inside; rather the growth inside has made me different and deep down I know I'll be leaving the town where I grew up soon. I don't belong here anymore. I am like a disorted old photograph, complete with crooked willow tress swaying in the wind jutting just-so-slightly forward from a gray backdrop.
But inside I scream louder and more menacingly than ever to be see and be seen, to come alive behind cameras and show myself to the world in the sense I do it best, to move my body in ways that catch the silvery white of my skin as if under a perfect moon, free at last to be the fluidly sexual, hungily vibrant person I am. Though the world is muted in the gray of my shifty sleepwalking dance, certain needs I never knew I had have been floating dangerously, gloriously close to my surface over the past few months- ever since I had to come home from California and fell in love with Blair all over again. I never needed anyone to share my life with before. I was so in love with him for the few years I held him at a distance and was only his friend that it almost broke my body to sit next to him. But the plan was never to rest my life on anyone's shoulder even for a while, not at this age. Not before I was soul deep in my career, had made at least one independent film contact or plan, and more than held my own financially. None of this living like a ghost in my childhood home or being like I was before, scrounging hard at the frayed edges of my life and working three jobs so sick I hardly felt alive to make ends meet when rent time came around. I loved my life like that, for it was a work in progress and I lived mostly alone in the serenity of the self I've worked so hard to locate and revel in. But Blair didn't leave me when he went to rehab. Well, he did; he read those letters I wrote about not being ready to be with someone who had an addiction and he just froze me out. On the surface everything we had ever been was being torn apart and ruined last fall. But I could feel I was strong in his heart, filling it so much that he'd break if he showed me what was really there. I was the same and we were so mean for so long, until finally the war started to feel aimless and I cried on the phone, and he told me he wanted to try working things out again slow. I didn't think it was fair to me that I gave up my whole self to him in the back of my car on Thanksgiving, and he didn't think it was fair that he had to wait so long to have me wholly physically and emotionally. Life isn't fair, I said the next day. And you suck at fucking me. And I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I hadn't added the last part, but that's what "you suck at fucking me and I never want to see you again" meant. What hurt the most was that I'm sure he knows me enough to have known that and he stayed away for a while anyway. He's gone again now. I didn't answer his last batch of calls and he's gone again now, probably with Kelly or someone else even though I still feel myself in his heart and on his mind.
All my life I never needed anyone. Falling in love was a deep, unpleasant inconvenince, like sudden surgery on an internal organ or getting a wisdom tooth yanked out from the gums. before it's done growing in. Now I have these moments since he's been gone. Like blood to the surface of a wound, the way I miss Blair and want him with me bubbles up to fill my heart with pain and pleasure that's too much.
I've been in a meditative way as of late, peaceful inside even when the dirt path in front of me stretches out vast and gray. I need love and I need to be behind cameras to be complete like I need oxygen to live. It's extremely creepy how warm and palpable my feelings for Blair are in my veins this winter. The seasons have turned, and I not only posess a guttural need for him in my blood but also an innate urge to settle beside him for life. Just when I thought I was whole, tiny but eerily deep holes seeped into me the day he got into my car and I noticed something was different. He wasn't just dirtier and harder and homeless with longer hair. He just fit with me as we reuinted for the millionth time, felt like mine and I wondered for the first time what it would feel like if Kelly got him for life and not me. I felt sick and when the sky darkened on the way back to Avenel, I sunk lower than the dirt below the earth and felt more depressed than I'd ever felt over a guy, just like that. I talked more casually than ever and started vacantly out my window a lot in a blind, desperate hope that he wouldn't notice how genuinely I laughed at his quirky jokes or how beautiful I thought he was even looking like he just crawled out of a dumpster. He had seemed more uncomfortable than ever, too, and I broke inside wondering if it was because he felt how I did or just suddenly realized after five years that I'm not that attractive- or that he just wasn't in love with me anymore. It really shook me, that time we spent and hearing him confess his love and come inside my body if even for an impossibly short amount of time because I still have trouble opening to people I love- and then later on because he still has no idea how to make it last, which actually really makes me angry at him or even any guy who doesn't take care that that doesn't happen- if I'm going to take an entire dick in my mouth then a guy is going to make sure he more than pays me back for it when he fucks or sucks me. But that's another story altogether. What makes me doubly angry to reminisce about is that I hardly ever even care when I'm with Blair in the moment; it just feels so perfect and natural to be with him, like sliding into an old pair of slippers that already have your footprints in them, yet the fire is still there and I come just from getting him off sometimes. Which meant all my anger toward him about being too quick was really about whether or not I could trust him not to be sexist and think women don't need to come as long as they're in love or some stupid shit like that. He is the only guy I've ever been with who doesn't always do things to me for hours before even trying to get it in, or who thought it could wait till he takes five naps and eats some dinner as long as he comes. Once I didn't talk to him for a whole day because of it and when he finally broke me down enough to tell him what hurt me another day later, he had the nerve to look hurt. Then he'd said, "I haven't had any other complaints, and my ex-girlfriend didn't ever ask to be on top" and I told him I was dropping him off on the side of Route 1 first thing in the morning. Then he'd apologized all night and promised to learn me so that I eventually just said "Okay, if I ever say yes to going out with you again then I'll have to set aside a few months so you can learn" and he just smiled into me and said overconfidently that of course I was going to be with him again one of these days. There were so many misunderstandings because Blair is so private and I'm so sensitive that mentally I don't even know why I miss it, especially the fights that were so vicious, like a slow knife into both our souls, changing the shape of us. Ot at least I had FELT like it hurt him too, but I dount he'd admit that to anybody now. The truth is that I miss him so much, more instead of less as the blustery days of winter fly by. A part of my heart just tells me we're going to spend more time together eventually, even though the rest of me tries to remember not to care because there's a perfectly good chance he'll end up with his ex-girlfriend. He didn't move in with her and she didn't leaver her husband after two months for nothing a couple years ago. I try to tell myself that my heart won't break upon our separation if that separation isn't meant to be. Anything that's meant to be can be healed over. Losing my peace with Blair has been the first time my heart could not imagine itself being pieced totally together after a break with someone I loved. Even with Jason, when I couldn't taste food or enjoy life for months after I left his life, I knew that with God's help I would get over him because not once did I sense I was meant to marry him. With Blair I see an option line and it drives me crazy when it flashes, because I know there's another man out there for me I've yet to meet just like Chris said- and I know there's that awful Kelly lady I hate so much by default for him. I pretend to be flat to the thought of him ending up with her, but the truth is it fucks me up inside in a way that nothing ever has before. I always accept things that are meant to be. I might flatline emotionally for a while or even lose my path if it hurts too bad to lose love like it did with Jason, but I never felt before that something romantic could fuck up my very essence inside- hurt who I am or scar my soul. That worries me. Above all, my life is about self-preservation and silently manifesting success. I have long since resigned myself to being one of those people who no one suspects will do good things but then- when no one's looking- there I go and everyone says, "Wow. She did that? Good for her." When I was a little girl I drew pictures of myself on the front of Sports Illustrated and dreamed of dollar signs, not white dresses and my family watching me commit half of my life to another human being. Something about saying that "till death do us part" piece STILL seems unnerving and even morbid to me. Why should the man I love have to commit to anyone but himself and God, and why should I? If I have true love but life breaks the direction we had once flown in together, who am I to hate my loved one for losing me to rediscover himself? I could imagine crying and breaking and hurting over divorce for some time, but hating? I don't think I could, unless of course the person I loved did overt evil things to hurt me, or truly tried to end me with goodbye. I know no one could ever do that, and any man who imagines he can genuinely break me after all I've been through can laugh alone as long as he wants because it just wouldn't happen. But that doesn't mean I'm not afraid to keep love and live in it peacefully. I am indeed. Love changes and softens a person, makes someone feel like two instead of one. When it ends, I get meaner than my mother sometimes. I have to detox from the whole experience of the love that once was like I have to detox from my illness now. It frightens me to miss Blair simply and genuinely in my heart, for rarely are the feeings I have simple and honest. But everytime I start to break or cry, a new vessel of energy inside fills me up with warmth and vital information so that I have the courage to look in the mirror and face my life as it is today.
The truth is that I don't need love. I am love. And the partership my path has recognized as an intrinsic, meaningful part of this life will be attracted to me in time as long as I keep this knowledge alive inside. Tonight I pray up to God and the blank sheet of starts that the same goes for my health and career.
I don't need the light of a camera to flash me alive. I am that dream, and it will come to me as long as I am good to others and follow my path in as much peace as I can muster. I will be an actress and a writer in time if I continue to make contacts and believe that the force of my future is powerful enough to break through the horizon of illness and depression.
In the moments that I meditate, time stands magically still in the dark and I don't want for anything. These moments are precious stones I've picked up along the way on this sandy path I walk, and I keep them in my pocket as I go. I'll want to decorate the mural of my life with them someday when my career desires and heart are fulfilled, or at least in the process of being so.
Other times, sleep is not so good. First of all, it's hard to attain due to both spiritual and physical troubles in my heart. Last night the skipped beats and chest pains culminated in such an intense pinpoint pressure in the center of my heart that I lost my breath if I laid down, and if I had had a surreal doubt that it was really happening, all I had to do was touch my neck. Pins and needles, just like the black static of sleep is as I struggle to begin embarking on the path to wellness and stand at the edge of the cliff that is the first chapter of my life thus far. My heart aches in more ways than one, and though I am now cleansed of any disease that isn't medical, both types of heart pain seem to stream together, one instigating the other. The monster of my heart pain usually flares most at night, when the world is dark and the night looks like leather outside. First there's the all-encompassingly painful sensation that a weight the size of the world is resting on my chest, and then come the skipped beats. It can happen at a time when I'm totally calm, but it's always worsened by worry. My worries are killers and they eat my life alive until it feels like nothing more than a dark ghost of what it used to be- till I feel I have rotted myself. Lately I try hard not to take the whole vision I have in my soul of my life down piece by piece, scrutinizing and analyzing my plan until all that's left seems to be half a weathered soul and faded pieces of paper. In a way my life feels like that anyway, though. Is this what happens when the first chapter of one's life is so wholly eventful? I've already been through hell and back, my soul having survived ruthless abuse and then mental illness; I found the true love that felt like the center of my life then lost it, discovering myself if the process; I hated myself with the fires of hell until my life was almost burned away; I then got sick and was bedridden, broken into a million little pieces- all those shattered pieces of my life turning inside out at my touch as I reexamined breath I've ever taken; and alas, I have found myself. And I love that person. But I'm wiped out by a tidal wave of exhaustion, and my quiet days in the company of my own aura with coffee and books are the humble hiatus God has given to me from above so that I might find what it takes to get well and start all anew. It feels like just me and the cold whistle of the winter winds now out here.
The other problem with sleep is that a long night of it doesn't refresh me, but makes me groggy inside. Sleep is deadly and deep in the sense once I let it in, it stays like a dark hole inside of me and it doesn't want to let me go. If I'm gruesomely, horrifyingly honest with myself, a part of me is wont to divorce my marriage to physical and emotional exhaustion as well. Being a sleepwalker in a muffled world turned upside down has its advantages; I'm not someone who easily handles raw emotion and walking through the world as if I'm made of warm rubber doesn't leave much room for feelings. I'm so tired that I'm gasping for even a hole of oxygen and clarity to open up in the sky and let me continue on the weathered road I travel, which up till now has been easy to tell myself is because of the illness. I know that exhaustion comes with the territory of having a sickness, but must it be the black mask I show the world and myself when I look in the mirror? Sometimes I can't help how God-awfully tired I am; chronic bodily pain, chills, sweats, and various colds all melded into one monstrous tangle inside one's chest cavity will do that. But what Chris said was that it's not an excuse to slip into the darknessof my life. He said I have to wake up now in order to get well. He told me that if I do everything he said, I'll look back at this in several years and say, "What a crazy trip that was!" That's literally what he said, even as he read aloud almost my entire list of symptoms. I've got to tap my soul and tell my body it's had its rest and it's time for me to live my life. A part of me is sad to try and wake my poor soul from this dream, because although it's black and aimless it's also the first time I've ever really slept in my whole life.
I mused over this today as I searched for jobs in the thinning, darkening day alongside my mother. The whole day seemed to thin indeed as I had one of the only meaningful conversations I had with my mother in a long time. We talked about goodbyes and the end of loves and her new man and my plans for California. The sweet, clear blue sky felt like a new one, but the sunny clouds frosted the day like the icing of a million sweet old memories. I had to shut my eyes to them and see black to avoid thinking of all the times I'd rode to Hooters with Elena last spring, and even the crystal clear loving days I spent in that town with Tony for two years. Those two years were perhaps the most innocent I'd ever had in my life; though Tony was more like family to me than a man I was in love with, our bond was deep and we were intrinsically woven into each other's existances for a long time. Oozingly, almost painfully sweet, wide-eyed Tony with the sunset in his watery gazes really brought out my innocence like no one else ever could, for better and worse. When I was with Tony, the world was always somewhat of a fairy tale or a magic carpet ride, held above the ground by dreams, so many of the truths that made us who were were disguised by cotton candy days like today conjured back to my mind. Reality was really a knife to that relationship, I suddenly recalled. To Tony, I was His Future Wife, frozen like the clear, cold winter days and the much older neighborhood ladies in the Scotch Plains area. One summer came I and dared to break the sad, eerie guise staring back at the mirror, barely squeexing into ome of my old short Holister skirts with a barely-there tank top. I didn't get his disapproval logically; all his friends at the firehouse had girlfriends that wore the same kinds of things. I told myself I didn't anymore because of the weight I'd gained, but the truth was that weight was just more ice and guards I'd built around myself because I wasn't happy being Tony's Girlfriend. I looked so gray and dead to myself in the mirror in a whole different, much more disturbing way than I do now to myself when I'm sick or down because of changes in my life. I was being someone I was not with Tony. When I dressed like Lindsay, it brought just a teensy, tiny piece of her back to life and I'd wanted to go dancing so I could feel the world come alive again for the first time in what felt like almost a whole lifetime since I'd become Tony's Woman. So we did- but not without me suffering dark, killer side glances all night then tears in his blue Mustang before he dropped me off. My outfit and the way I only tried to dance dirty with him when all our friends formed a crowd made him feel like there was a part of me I shared with the rest of the world that he wasn't allowed to know. I always triend telling him it wasn't true, but then the clouds settled in and I knew it was. I am a performer at heart, it makes me feel alive and connected when my skin shows, I dreamed of becoming an actress all my life, and it broke me in two to pretend I was someone else in an attempt to assauge at least the surface of Tony's chronic jealous wounds. It was always, "It makes me want to kill myself and realize I have a dark side when I can't reach you" and "I feel like you don't really enjoy yourself at the fireman's house parties, and if it's because the other girls there are skinny you can talk to me about your insecurities"- or my favorite, after two years of my being out of touch with Jason- "I bet you wouldn't hold back from Jason if he wanted to fuck you, I cry myself to sleep so many nights because I know you would go crazy on him." And I bet he would out his fingers through my hair like I was the only thing alive at that moment and sincerely compliment my body and actually love me for who I am, I'd wanted to say, but was frozen silent. I didn't know why I thought Jason would love me until he did after Tony and me were through. And at one point I would've given my life not to hurt Tony, because I really did love him so much that my life was wrapped bittersweetly around his, even though our history had bloomed from a dark place in the woods no one else knew; it was as if we'd grown from the same root of the earth, even if romance hadn't exactly my first instinct with him and never really became it over time. And he made me happy in so many ways no one else ever could, because he Tony and for a long time he was my best very friend. I thought today as my mother and me drove through the blinding new sun" Most things we go through in life are not all bad. And when they are, there is always a lesson learned and a gift to take on our way. I might feel a little lost right now, but I've been loved so many times in so many ways, and I have what it takes to face down the force of illness with that of a happy new day.
I smiled quietly to myself as my mother talked to me about how scared she was for a while that I was too sick to make it through, stunned silent by peace and sadness. Who would have thought she gave my life a second thought? And here she was worrying she'd be destroyed if I died. I closed my eyes and thought, "Oh my God, no matter what happens to me medically or how depressed I get, I can't disappoint the people I realized cared about me through all this awful mess.
I'm so warm inside, because I've reached the end of such a very weary, long road of suffering. And yet- so many people and places I've loved are gone, parts of me wiped out just like that. What if I am not strong enough to stomache the changes in my life? I suppose the real fear screaming in my gut is not that I'm not strong enough to silently withstand the cold and the ugly. I'm really not one to explode with change of season or the colors of what I feel inside when life is stunted or uprooted. I handle things too quietly, in fact. And that is what I'm so afraid of. That is what chases me inward with such great, encompassing fear. As it is, I numb all my emotions by default. I don't even mean to do it- I'm just so intense and emotional that I suspect it would be dangerous for me to feel at a time when my whole life up to this point has culminated to an bittersweet finale in the center of me. I'm angry and incomprehensibly sad about too many things to fit into the space of my world; I would go crazy, maybe, if I could feel. I've wanted to stick needles up my arm since I was barely born, a toddler or so. I chose at an early age between living my life wreckless or living it frozen, and my weary soul aches reassurance that I've kept my word. Perhaps if I let myself feel how sad I am that my first love- or at least the first chapter of it- is over, I would just fall to the floor and cry out the guts if all my memories. Nothing about doing that sounds even a morsel like relief to me. Elena used to tell me that anyone who knows me can tell I'm screaming inside all the time, but my world would move forward easily if I just let my emotions out sometimes. But how? If I dare to even touch the iceberg of them around other people, they don't begin to understand. To be fair, it' mostly because my painful inner core comes out in equations and analyzations when it's really ready to burst from the inside. I just can't cry in front of people, except for Blair and that's a whole other story.
This time in my life is really the end of so many parts of everything I've known thus far on my path in life. With that revelation has rushed in a deep d. What if I get lost inside these vast, nameless winter days? Or what if I take too many dark bullets on the insideese days I wake up into the world, but I'm sleeping and still inside for long stretches of time after a full night's sleep. As if a spell has wainto a mere goldfish in a tiny clear bubble tank, I long to taste and swallow a world that looks gray and endless from where I am. Sleep stretches out to cover the suddenly innately unfamch of my world in ice, and I see all the aces I know and love with a kind of stranger's eyes. It isn't so much that I'm totally disconnected inside; rather the growth inside has made me different and deep down I know I'll be leaving the town where I grew up soon. I don't belong here anymore. I am like a disorted old photograph, complete with crooked willow tress swaying in the wind jutting just-so-slightly forward from a gray backdrop.
But inside I scream louder and more menacingly than ever to be see and be seen, to come alive behind cameras and show myself to the world in the sense I do it best, to move my body in ways that catch the silvery white of my skin as if under a perfect moon, free at last to be the fluidly sexual, hungily vibrant person I am. Though the world is muted in the gray of my shifty sleepwalking dance, certain needs I never knew I had have been floating dangerously, gloriously close to my surface over the past few months- ever since I had to come home from California and fell in love with Blair all over again. I never needed anyone to share my life with before. I was so in love with him for the few years I held him at a distance and was only his friend that it almost broke my body to sit next to him. But the plan was never to rest my life on anyone's shoulder even for a while, not at this age. Not before I was soul deep in my career, had made at least one independent film contact or plan, and more than held my own financially. None of this living like a ghost in my childhood home or being like I was before, scrounging hard at the frayed edges of my life and working three jobs so sick I hardly felt alive to make ends meet when rent time came around. I loved my life like that, for it was a work in progress and I lived mostly alone in the serenity of the self I've worked so hard to locate and revel in. But Blair didn't leave me when he went to rehab. Well, he did; he read those letters I wrote about not being ready to be with someone who had an addiction and he just froze me out. On the surface everything we had ever been was being torn apart and ruined last fall. But I could feel I was strong in his heart, filling it so much that he'd break if he showed me what was really there. I was the same and we were so mean for so long, until finally the war started to feel aimless and I cried on the phone, and he told me he wanted to try working things out again slow. I didn't think it was fair to me that I gave up my whole self to him in the back of my car on Thanksgiving, and he didn't think it was fair that he had to wait so long to have me wholly physically and emotionally. Life isn't fair, I said the next day. And you suck at fucking me. And I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I hadn't added the last part, but that's what "you suck at fucking me and I never want to see you again" meant. What hurt the most was that I'm sure he knows me enough to have known that and he stayed away for a while anyway. He's gone again now. I didn't answer his last batch of calls and he's gone again now, probably with Kelly or someone else even though I still feel myself in his heart and on his mind.
All my life I never needed anyone. Falling in love was a deep, unpleasant inconvenince, like sudden surgery on an internal organ or getting a wisdom tooth yanked out from the gums. before it's done growing in. Now I have these moments since he's been gone. Like blood to the surface of a wound, the way I miss Blair and want him with me bubbles up to fill my heart with pain and pleasure that's too much.
I've been in a meditative way as of late, peaceful inside even when the dirt path in front of me stretches out vast and gray. I need love and I need to be behind cameras to be complete like I need oxygen to live. It's extremely creepy how warm and palpable my feelings for Blair are in my veins this winter. The seasons have turned, and I not only posess a guttural need for him in my blood but also an innate urge to settle beside him for life. Just when I thought I was whole, tiny but eerily deep holes seeped into me the day he got into my car and I noticed something was different. He wasn't just dirtier and harder and homeless with longer hair. He just fit with me as we reuinted for the millionth time, felt like mine and I wondered for the first time what it would feel like if Kelly got him for life and not me. I felt sick and when the sky darkened on the way back to Avenel, I sunk lower than the dirt below the earth and felt more depressed than I'd ever felt over a guy, just like that. I talked more casually than ever and started vacantly out my window a lot in a blind, desperate hope that he wouldn't notice how genuinely I laughed at his quirky jokes or how beautiful I thought he was even looking like he just crawled out of a dumpster. He had seemed more uncomfortable than ever, too, and I broke inside wondering if it was because he felt how I did or just suddenly realized after five years that I'm not that attractive- or that he just wasn't in love with me anymore. It really shook me, that time we spent and hearing him confess his love and come inside my body if even for an impossibly short amount of time because I still have trouble opening to people I love- and then later on because he still has no idea how to make it last, which actually really makes me angry at him or even any guy who doesn't take care that that doesn't happen- if I'm going to take an entire dick in my mouth then a guy is going to make sure he more than pays me back for it when he fucks or sucks me. But that's another story altogether. What makes me doubly angry to reminisce about is that I hardly ever even care when I'm with Blair in the moment; it just feels so perfect and natural to be with him, like sliding into an old pair of slippers that already have your footprints in them, yet the fire is still there and I come just from getting him off sometimes. Which meant all my anger toward him about being too quick was really about whether or not I could trust him not to be sexist and think women don't need to come as long as they're in love or some stupid shit like that. He is the only guy I've ever been with who doesn't always do things to me for hours before even trying to get it in, or who thought it could wait till he takes five naps and eats some dinner as long as he comes. Once I didn't talk to him for a whole day because of it and when he finally broke me down enough to tell him what hurt me another day later, he had the nerve to look hurt. Then he'd said, "I haven't had any other complaints, and my ex-girlfriend didn't ever ask to be on top" and I told him I was dropping him off on the side of Route 1 first thing in the morning. Then he'd apologized all night and promised to learn me so that I eventually just said "Okay, if I ever say yes to going out with you again then I'll have to set aside a few months so you can learn" and he just smiled into me and said overconfidently that of course I was going to be with him again one of these days. There were so many misunderstandings because Blair is so private and I'm so sensitive that mentally I don't even know why I miss it, especially the fights that were so vicious, like a slow knife into both our souls, changing the shape of us. Ot at least I had FELT like it hurt him too, but I dount he'd admit that to anybody now. The truth is that I miss him so much, more instead of less as the blustery days of winter fly by. A part of my heart just tells me we're going to spend more time together eventually, even though the rest of me tries to remember not to care because there's a perfectly good chance he'll end up with his ex-girlfriend. He didn't move in with her and she didn't leaver her husband after two months for nothing a couple years ago. I try to tell myself that my heart won't break upon our separation if that separation isn't meant to be. Anything that's meant to be can be healed over. Losing my peace with Blair has been the first time my heart could not imagine itself being pieced totally together after a break with someone I loved. Even with Jason, when I couldn't taste food or enjoy life for months after I left his life, I knew that with God's help I would get over him because not once did I sense I was meant to marry him. With Blair I see an option line and it drives me crazy when it flashes, because I know there's another man out there for me I've yet to meet just like Chris said- and I know there's that awful Kelly lady I hate so much by default for him. I pretend to be flat to the thought of him ending up with her, but the truth is it fucks me up inside in a way that nothing ever has before. I always accept things that are meant to be. I might flatline emotionally for a while or even lose my path if it hurts too bad to lose love like it did with Jason, but I never felt before that something romantic could fuck up my very essence inside- hurt who I am or scar my soul. That worries me. Above all, my life is about self-preservation and silently manifesting success. I have long since resigned myself to being one of those people who no one suspects will do good things but then- when no one's looking- there I go and everyone says, "Wow. She did that? Good for her." When I was a little girl I drew pictures of myself on the front of Sports Illustrated and dreamed of dollar signs, not white dresses and my family watching me commit half of my life to another human being. Something about saying that "till death do us part" piece STILL seems unnerving and even morbid to me. Why should the man I love have to commit to anyone but himself and God, and why should I? If I have true love but life breaks the direction we had once flown in together, who am I to hate my loved one for losing me to rediscover himself? I could imagine crying and breaking and hurting over divorce for some time, but hating? I don't think I could, unless of course the person I loved did overt evil things to hurt me, or truly tried to end me with goodbye. I know no one could ever do that, and any man who imagines he can genuinely break me after all I've been through can laugh alone as long as he wants because it just wouldn't happen. But that doesn't mean I'm not afraid to keep love and live in it peacefully. I am indeed. Love changes and softens a person, makes someone feel like two instead of one. When it ends, I get meaner than my mother sometimes. I have to detox from the whole experience of the love that once was like I have to detox from my illness now. It frightens me to miss Blair simply and genuinely in my heart, for rarely are the feeings I have simple and honest. But everytime I start to break or cry, a new vessel of energy inside fills me up with warmth and vital information so that I have the courage to look in the mirror and face my life as it is today.
The truth is that I don't need love. I am love. And the partership my path has recognized as an intrinsic, meaningful part of this life will be attracted to me in time as long as I keep this knowledge alive inside. Tonight I pray up to God and the blank sheet of starts that the same goes for my health and career.
I don't need the light of a camera to flash me alive. I am that dream, and it will come to me as long as I am good to others and follow my path in as much peace as I can muster. I will be an actress and a writer in time if I continue to make contacts and believe that the force of my future is powerful enough to break through the horizon of illness and depression.
In the moments that I meditate, time stands magically still in the dark and I don't want for anything. These moments are precious stones I've picked up along the way on this sandy path I walk, and I keep them in my pocket as I go. I'll want to decorate the mural of my life with them someday when my career desires and heart are fulfilled, or at least in the process of being so.