Boys don't cry
I've tried everything to sleep tonight, but I'm too filled with this burning night and the events that led up to this flat hour. First of all, the heart palpitations are getting more serious so I'm thanking God my appointment at Deborah is first thing in the morning. Tonight the palps not only make me see black, but rise almost up to my throat so that all speech or breath ceases when one explodes in my chest cavity, reverberating in loud brassy rings up to my surface. It feels too eerily alike to the way emotions happen in me, burning a silent hole until finally something snaps inside and I'm covered in the darkness of them as they rise uncontrollably like lava to my surface.
Secondly, the burning pain in my chest escalated into one of these black, frightening eruptions as I stood on the line at Wlagreens buying my sister a pregnancy test. She's fifteen, hasn't had her period in too long, and just started having sex with her boyfriend. And when she came home from his house tonight, she almost put me on my deathbed by telling me she might be pregant and wouldn't even be that disappointed if she was. Time froze. My whole world froze. I know my sister has a real maternal spark and all the psychics who've read me saw an early marriage and family for her, but fifteen is just not okay. She's still a kid! My voice was really frozen when I finally found it within me to remind her of this, as well as all the dangers/major life tradgedies of having a child at her age. I was more scared for my sister than I've ever even been for myself tonight, and selfishly wondered if she had any idea what her growing older is doing to me inside. My sister is sometimes like a part of me, and as my life settles I feel it's my duty to protect her at all costs. My mother has a good heart deep down, but it's tainted and she's basically straight-up crazy.
Our mother never had any objections to my sister and me getting pregnant at hideously young, ugly ages. When I was sixteen I could hardly get out of bed on days when I wasn't having some kind of sexual contact to keep the dim light I did still have within somewhat on. If I didn't have it, the darkness would close in and I'd see bats and demons in my soul, that whimsy shard of light deep down unable to sustain me even physically. My mother did not mind of I got pregnant, even encouraged it once. I had felt so unsafe even with Blair sometimes, as if I was in hell because there were no boundaries at all around my body or soul. I know my sister doesn't feel things quite so acutely and doesn't have the psycologically disturbed vines I had tied around my mind at that age, but STILL. Something in her is fragile just because she's fifteen and grew up in this house, and it pierces my heart. I feel totally responsible for everything she does that might possibly make her hurt. I become her in moments like the one we had tonight when she told me she was scared. My chest had been aching and I'd been gasping for breath before that frightening news but into my night, but I told my mother I needed something from Walgreeens and took my sister there anyway. And proceeded to come very close to blacking out in the check-out aisle. I had to whisper to her that I had to go sit outside and needed her to pay- the pain and palpitations in my heart were that bad. I closed my eyes for a second on the flatlining night outside, saw the gentle twinkling lights of the dirty town fade from me.
Lately I've been having thoughts that are not good. It's not just the peaceful sense of death because the first chapter of my life has come to a close and I'm finally centered in my soul. It's not even the sense that my life is thinning and the raw fear of dying before I get to make my life and fulfill the dreams- the that provide the energy for the blood to keep flowing through me through this illness, flowing in perfect circles which proclaim the past is dead and all is well inside my soul now. No, those might sound morbid and feel that way sometimes, but they're just my natural processes. The majoirty of me is made of the past, and the past is dying quite a humble, peaceful death inside me. The thoughts that trouble me are those that surface in moments of emergency like the one I had tonight. When my life flashes before my eyes and I view the world from a cutting edge observer's point of view, I can see my life and my town so objectively that I'm surprised when I can't reach out and touch everything in one fell swoop of my hand. And I realize that I'm twenty-three years old and can't be touched. Twenty-three years old, and when a man I love tells me he wants me to have his kids someday I turn inside out with pain, repulsed at the notion that I could ever be anything but frozen alone.
I know these sound like odd thoughts to surface at a moment in time that feels life or death, but being sick makes me irrevocably true to my heart no matter how the pain there might transform and swallow me in blackness. Why is it that when I find my peaceful center inside- my happy ending after what feels like a whole lifetime of searching- my shortcomings reach out like leeches from the deep bottom corners of the earth to take hold of me? When they come, I sometimess crave even in the wholeness I've found to carve tiny holes in my body so I can deal with the bleeding, tangible form of the nonsensical holes in my existance. My life New Jersey looks like a cloudland now that I realized I don't want to spend the rest of my future here, and sometimes I feel like it can't hurt me as badly when it's mostly behind me. But of course it does, because no insight into the future can simply mend holes that were made in someone from the past.
My sister came out of Walgreens, and I took her home in silence, my heart jumping to my throat and freezing at the speed bumps. Of course I was frightened, yet I felt inexplicably solid inside as I drove us back down the one-way black road to my house, the one that reflects so eerily the one I'm traveling on in my life right now. I'm on track, I feel, yet the future is shrouded from my view. Somehow I knew I would be safe for the night and was not having a heart attack. We're going back home, I thought. It's not the home where I belong or want my life to be, but I'm not well yet and my sister needs me so home it is for now, even if the sketchy orange lights flash around me but refuse to shine directly on my face because I almost don't belong there anymore. My sister took the test and it was negative. I cried inside with relief and then with something else I couldn't name when she went to call her boyfriend with the good news.
What is missing from my life? I realized tonight that it's not just my lack of an equal wavelength in my bonds with female friends that's been depressing me lately. The contrast between us looks darker on my end, and what cuts like a knife into the steady balance of energies I've found in my current life is not just a sense of aloneness from my friends. Their lives are mostly about relationships, the friends I have in New Jersey. But it's not that I didn't choose one or couldn't have one that's been haunting me- well, not exactly. See, I LITERALLY could not have a boyfriend if I wanted one. I simply can't be held by anything but the warm embrace of these cold winter nights that are the aftermath of finding myself at last; even though I've discovered my essence inside, it feels so jarringly wrong for me to let any other human embrace around me. It isn't so much that I don't think I deserve to have an equal or a partner on my wavelength in this world, although that's certainly part of it. The large chunk of my wound is that I grew up with the resolve to come into this world alone and leave it alone, having become whole and graced with the company of my true self along the way. I'm pretty on the outside- God knows why- but on the inside I freeze with rage and a lifetime of sadness when someone I love touches me or loves me back the same way. I'm not supposed to need anyone, at least not on a romantic level. I can bear the cold and be happy; the world does not start to shrivel and die just because I deny myself a partnership I'm obviously not even ready for. So why did it this time? Why do I feel like someone is supposed to be in my life now or palpably soon, coloring my world with a sense of partnership and a place to rest my head at last? These senses are carving a hole in me that no one else can see, making me feel virtually, painfully invisible because every other girl I know can shamelessly show their need for a man but I can't even give a real hug. Other womens' loves are free to touch the outside world and are alive because of this connection I can't quite seem to make. I feel ugly, shriveled inside with nothing to give, and it comes from years of carrying everyone elses' loads. I hate the world with a passion because I'm cynical and don't know anyone else of my sex who is the same. I hate the world sometimes because the sun can shin eand I still am encompassed with hatred because in a way I hate myself and so many others in my life. I feel like I inch closer and closer to the phenomenon of becoming Janet every day lately. I always think I'm going toward the sun, but if I am then I'm taking the dark part of her with me.
When Blair made me melt, I went irreversibly cold inside and a rageful fire threatened to take over my completely because of the control I'd lost when he stole my breath. Nothing makes me feel hatred like the notion of losing control, except for now maybe the sense that I am not like other women. I am usually quite content alone and have been stunned by the sudden, horrific feeling that I'm stuck on a motionless boat while life moves in the beautiful, free waters all around me. Sooner or later time will pass and I will be old, dorwning into a black hole in the boat because I was more comfortable with stagnancy than taking a chance. Maybe time has already passed and I'm already old. I can't really rell anymore. A part of me lives through the joy of my family's and friends' positive forward movement in relationships, and I always thought that was just because I'm empathetic- just like I always thought that all their problems were signed into my painful shoulders because I'm absorbant and can't do a thing to help it. But no. No, now I'm forced to think maybe this is not the whole story. It's only one side.
Last time Blair held me nearly two months ago, I was humbly reduced to the most stunningly human need I've ever felt spark to life within myself- not just to be fucked or temporarily loved like I usually am happy with, but to..merge with someone, I guess, and have a baby. I'm still fucked-up and ashamed over it everyday. Every morning what I wanted from my first love recently is a haunting shadow over the gray of my days. Each sunset feels more and more unfinished lately. That sun may have passed and faded into twillight- that chance to be with Blair is gone and dead. But the sense that I'll see him again and have another chance is still unfortunately lingering, as is a new need that blooms sorely from me, making my life feel as dead as the boat I missed last time he asked me. I sense something around me that is not really tangibly able to be held in my hands. I sense a relationship coming to me soon, but it's not here now so I can touch it but can't and that drives me crazy! Sort of like my reunion with Elena or my move before it came, only this one seems to have the power to drive me crazy. Crazy because as abstract as I say this, the truth is I'm miserable having conciously decided not to be with Blair, even if that's totally, encompassingly eronious and irrational. I can't be with someone addicted to drugs. My mind knows this, so why can't my heart and body follow suit? It suddenly cuts deep into the whole of my soul and life to see couples because my love is a dark, dirty shameful secret- and my body literally screams out for him like it would for food if I starved myself that way. But I could never tell my girl friends I'm depressed over a guy like they tell me about theirs. Most of them have no idea I'm even alive or possessed of a real identity that has nothing to do with my abiltiy to read people and events for them. Note to self: It makes me feel dead or dying to be around these people, so I must cut all the ones who don't see me or care to see me off. The ones who do know and love me look at me incredulously if I say I kind of sort of wish I might have ended up with Blair- as if I have to heads or something- and say, "Then when are you gonna stop saying no? When you're a senior citizen?" Too late, I think to myself, deep inside the sweet solitary dark of myself again. I think I might already be senior citizen. Or maybe I'm just a ghost, and life passed me by in the blink of an eye. That's how it feels. I never knew the way I was could hurt me so before. But the fact that I most often angrily shrug guys off me when they say nice things- or dig myself a hole to live in when I get what makes my heart feel complete- makes me feel like my life is fading down the scope of a long tunnel. I can admire the ripples and pretty things and other people having personal lives, but I'm frozen in my aloneness and there's no way I won't eventually fade down that drain. How dare I even begin to dream of some of the things I have been lately. It really must have been some vague false alarm of a dream that I fell in real love and wanted...certain things. Things that are so immensely painful for me to admit even in a journal that they're still too much like ghosts to say refer to them directly. I've said it before. Ahh, whatever, I'm drained and depressed into a tiny corner of myself as it is tonight. I wanted to live with Blair and eventually have kids with him. And I just really need the heartbreak to be over soon. Blair is the person I used to call when there was heartbreak in my life, from other guys or illness of family or friends or just me. There's virtually no one out here in this cold new world that can possibly understand how I feel about him, never mind understand that I can't let him have me for good if he still wants. I don't contain the softness and cotton candy fluff of womanhood- to me, wearing white puffy dresses only alludes to the flamboyant, deluded fantasy that life is a peach or a cruise ship after the honeymoon, and coddling a man or slaving over the stove for anyone but me aren't things that run naturally in my blood. Blair used to laugh at me sometimes when I said I really was not a feminine person and would perfer not to be treated that way in bed, saying with some mock scorn that I was one of the softest girls he'd ever met. He'd touch me with such love on careful finger tips and his voice would take on a peaceful, grounded and serious tone as he'd go on telling me he promised to take care of me like no one else had.
"It must have been years since you cried", he would say, "And I would kill everyone who made you still like this in my arms. Don't you like when I touch you? I know you do. Just relax. You know everything is gonna be okay. We're adults now. All that shit from the past is over. You can be alive with me now, you can do what you want to me." But as much as I wanted to jump on him and fuck him with all the feeling I've never come alive with or shown all my life, I couldn't. I was frozen. I don't contain the soft feminine part inside that would respond well to hugs and comfort, and I couldn't let him find that out for himself. I don't naturally kiss slow or compliment out loud or any of the things women do by default, and it tears me apart to realize. Even when I am expressing the full of my love, I bite lips and make people bleed and fuck hard. Blair had to tell me to calm down. That's horrible and the truth is I'm living in a shadow of shame all the time, wasting my whole life in a search for something I can't find in myself. I'm frozen like glass in the mysterious pain of not knowing I have anything in common with other women, and suddenly needing desperately to know it in order to feel alive.
As glad as I am for my mother that she's found someone who makes her happy (trust me- a real feat for her and something I certainly never suspected was possible), it makes me really sick to hear her rolling around on her bed all night on the phone giggling like a school aged kid so we can all hear. I never want to be all that emotionally stunted false emotional fluff, even if I live most of my life in misery like she did and the rose sheets of freedom are pretty. I've always been my father's daughter. My mother's reactions to almost everything have always been to either scream and cry like a hateful, out of control child or coldly manipulate. My father may have been cold on the outside, but when I was a kid I idolized him because he was warm on the inside and I was the only one who really knew him- because, inexplicable as it was, we were cut from the same mold. And my father was nothing if not honest, so I decided when I was just a seed of a person to never let him see a shadow over my head. But where did that get me, really? I'm lost, I haven't found my own way in personal matters, and all he sees are stormclouds above me. "You want to be an actress? You look good enough..(empasis on the word LOOK, as if the rest of me is lost on him- why are you not in the Guild yet? Good actors aren't lazy. Why are you still sick? Adults get better. That's just life. There are bills to pay. You're stuck, move on. What's wrong with you?" I am twenty-three years old and even the simplest of my excitements- and my days are simple joys if any lately- brings an angry, embarassed flush to my father's face if I show them. He hasn't looked me directly in the eye since I was thirteen, or maybe even before. I realized a long time ago that I'm flat inside and can't be loved the way other women can. It's only just begun to hurt me in a direct way now. I know that probably means I'm growing more mature and don't need as many abstractions, and I'd like to let my feelings flow through me like a back-tracking river now to heal for the future. But I'm in so much pain, I don't know how I'm going to open my eyes each morning. I mean that in an emotional sense. I realized so many things lately and just hurt all over, my past coming through me in chills and sweats.
He would understand this if he were here. But he's not here and I'm being a baby for still needing him. I'm supposed to be a tough person, I always was able to look away from most things and never look behind me when I left something for good...my father would think horrendously of me for this. I feel like I'm dying. Worthless. Living life in a hole. There, I said it. I'm partially unable to be connected to because of the long-standing iron sense in me that if I show my father I can be happy and make it in this life alone, then he'll finally think I'm worth even a mental embrace. I'm not doing so bad. Why does he think I'm doing such shit with my life, throwing it down a hole when I make my own money, have a direction, handle being sick better than he handles a day of the flu, and hold my own emotionally? My direction may not be the nine-to-five job I have at the VNA, but a lot of people's aren't...right? I really could be happy on my own, and that's something I'm really thankful for inside myself- that wholeness and companionship I can find with only me as the road of life twists and turns unpreditably like some fucked-up magical mystery tour. My father sees only blackness and despair where in this grassy tranquil place where I am now. I know I'm standing on the edge of my life and could go either way, could fall off or make it to the other side of my life where there will be- at long last- happiness. I know how severe this place in my life is. How cold and harsh an endless this winter sky stretches out above me, as if its darkness blankets the entire rest of my life. But I can't make any leaps with this grinding pain constantly hauntingand eating me away from the inside, the pain of being a woman who acts like a man. I was taught to be strong. Boys don't cry. And apparently, neither do I.
Secondly, the burning pain in my chest escalated into one of these black, frightening eruptions as I stood on the line at Wlagreens buying my sister a pregnancy test. She's fifteen, hasn't had her period in too long, and just started having sex with her boyfriend. And when she came home from his house tonight, she almost put me on my deathbed by telling me she might be pregant and wouldn't even be that disappointed if she was. Time froze. My whole world froze. I know my sister has a real maternal spark and all the psychics who've read me saw an early marriage and family for her, but fifteen is just not okay. She's still a kid! My voice was really frozen when I finally found it within me to remind her of this, as well as all the dangers/major life tradgedies of having a child at her age. I was more scared for my sister than I've ever even been for myself tonight, and selfishly wondered if she had any idea what her growing older is doing to me inside. My sister is sometimes like a part of me, and as my life settles I feel it's my duty to protect her at all costs. My mother has a good heart deep down, but it's tainted and she's basically straight-up crazy.
Our mother never had any objections to my sister and me getting pregnant at hideously young, ugly ages. When I was sixteen I could hardly get out of bed on days when I wasn't having some kind of sexual contact to keep the dim light I did still have within somewhat on. If I didn't have it, the darkness would close in and I'd see bats and demons in my soul, that whimsy shard of light deep down unable to sustain me even physically. My mother did not mind of I got pregnant, even encouraged it once. I had felt so unsafe even with Blair sometimes, as if I was in hell because there were no boundaries at all around my body or soul. I know my sister doesn't feel things quite so acutely and doesn't have the psycologically disturbed vines I had tied around my mind at that age, but STILL. Something in her is fragile just because she's fifteen and grew up in this house, and it pierces my heart. I feel totally responsible for everything she does that might possibly make her hurt. I become her in moments like the one we had tonight when she told me she was scared. My chest had been aching and I'd been gasping for breath before that frightening news but into my night, but I told my mother I needed something from Walgreeens and took my sister there anyway. And proceeded to come very close to blacking out in the check-out aisle. I had to whisper to her that I had to go sit outside and needed her to pay- the pain and palpitations in my heart were that bad. I closed my eyes for a second on the flatlining night outside, saw the gentle twinkling lights of the dirty town fade from me.
Lately I've been having thoughts that are not good. It's not just the peaceful sense of death because the first chapter of my life has come to a close and I'm finally centered in my soul. It's not even the sense that my life is thinning and the raw fear of dying before I get to make my life and fulfill the dreams- the that provide the energy for the blood to keep flowing through me through this illness, flowing in perfect circles which proclaim the past is dead and all is well inside my soul now. No, those might sound morbid and feel that way sometimes, but they're just my natural processes. The majoirty of me is made of the past, and the past is dying quite a humble, peaceful death inside me. The thoughts that trouble me are those that surface in moments of emergency like the one I had tonight. When my life flashes before my eyes and I view the world from a cutting edge observer's point of view, I can see my life and my town so objectively that I'm surprised when I can't reach out and touch everything in one fell swoop of my hand. And I realize that I'm twenty-three years old and can't be touched. Twenty-three years old, and when a man I love tells me he wants me to have his kids someday I turn inside out with pain, repulsed at the notion that I could ever be anything but frozen alone.
I know these sound like odd thoughts to surface at a moment in time that feels life or death, but being sick makes me irrevocably true to my heart no matter how the pain there might transform and swallow me in blackness. Why is it that when I find my peaceful center inside- my happy ending after what feels like a whole lifetime of searching- my shortcomings reach out like leeches from the deep bottom corners of the earth to take hold of me? When they come, I sometimess crave even in the wholeness I've found to carve tiny holes in my body so I can deal with the bleeding, tangible form of the nonsensical holes in my existance. My life New Jersey looks like a cloudland now that I realized I don't want to spend the rest of my future here, and sometimes I feel like it can't hurt me as badly when it's mostly behind me. But of course it does, because no insight into the future can simply mend holes that were made in someone from the past.
My sister came out of Walgreens, and I took her home in silence, my heart jumping to my throat and freezing at the speed bumps. Of course I was frightened, yet I felt inexplicably solid inside as I drove us back down the one-way black road to my house, the one that reflects so eerily the one I'm traveling on in my life right now. I'm on track, I feel, yet the future is shrouded from my view. Somehow I knew I would be safe for the night and was not having a heart attack. We're going back home, I thought. It's not the home where I belong or want my life to be, but I'm not well yet and my sister needs me so home it is for now, even if the sketchy orange lights flash around me but refuse to shine directly on my face because I almost don't belong there anymore. My sister took the test and it was negative. I cried inside with relief and then with something else I couldn't name when she went to call her boyfriend with the good news.
What is missing from my life? I realized tonight that it's not just my lack of an equal wavelength in my bonds with female friends that's been depressing me lately. The contrast between us looks darker on my end, and what cuts like a knife into the steady balance of energies I've found in my current life is not just a sense of aloneness from my friends. Their lives are mostly about relationships, the friends I have in New Jersey. But it's not that I didn't choose one or couldn't have one that's been haunting me- well, not exactly. See, I LITERALLY could not have a boyfriend if I wanted one. I simply can't be held by anything but the warm embrace of these cold winter nights that are the aftermath of finding myself at last; even though I've discovered my essence inside, it feels so jarringly wrong for me to let any other human embrace around me. It isn't so much that I don't think I deserve to have an equal or a partner on my wavelength in this world, although that's certainly part of it. The large chunk of my wound is that I grew up with the resolve to come into this world alone and leave it alone, having become whole and graced with the company of my true self along the way. I'm pretty on the outside- God knows why- but on the inside I freeze with rage and a lifetime of sadness when someone I love touches me or loves me back the same way. I'm not supposed to need anyone, at least not on a romantic level. I can bear the cold and be happy; the world does not start to shrivel and die just because I deny myself a partnership I'm obviously not even ready for. So why did it this time? Why do I feel like someone is supposed to be in my life now or palpably soon, coloring my world with a sense of partnership and a place to rest my head at last? These senses are carving a hole in me that no one else can see, making me feel virtually, painfully invisible because every other girl I know can shamelessly show their need for a man but I can't even give a real hug. Other womens' loves are free to touch the outside world and are alive because of this connection I can't quite seem to make. I feel ugly, shriveled inside with nothing to give, and it comes from years of carrying everyone elses' loads. I hate the world with a passion because I'm cynical and don't know anyone else of my sex who is the same. I hate the world sometimes because the sun can shin eand I still am encompassed with hatred because in a way I hate myself and so many others in my life. I feel like I inch closer and closer to the phenomenon of becoming Janet every day lately. I always think I'm going toward the sun, but if I am then I'm taking the dark part of her with me.
When Blair made me melt, I went irreversibly cold inside and a rageful fire threatened to take over my completely because of the control I'd lost when he stole my breath. Nothing makes me feel hatred like the notion of losing control, except for now maybe the sense that I am not like other women. I am usually quite content alone and have been stunned by the sudden, horrific feeling that I'm stuck on a motionless boat while life moves in the beautiful, free waters all around me. Sooner or later time will pass and I will be old, dorwning into a black hole in the boat because I was more comfortable with stagnancy than taking a chance. Maybe time has already passed and I'm already old. I can't really rell anymore. A part of me lives through the joy of my family's and friends' positive forward movement in relationships, and I always thought that was just because I'm empathetic- just like I always thought that all their problems were signed into my painful shoulders because I'm absorbant and can't do a thing to help it. But no. No, now I'm forced to think maybe this is not the whole story. It's only one side.
Last time Blair held me nearly two months ago, I was humbly reduced to the most stunningly human need I've ever felt spark to life within myself- not just to be fucked or temporarily loved like I usually am happy with, but to..merge with someone, I guess, and have a baby. I'm still fucked-up and ashamed over it everyday. Every morning what I wanted from my first love recently is a haunting shadow over the gray of my days. Each sunset feels more and more unfinished lately. That sun may have passed and faded into twillight- that chance to be with Blair is gone and dead. But the sense that I'll see him again and have another chance is still unfortunately lingering, as is a new need that blooms sorely from me, making my life feel as dead as the boat I missed last time he asked me. I sense something around me that is not really tangibly able to be held in my hands. I sense a relationship coming to me soon, but it's not here now so I can touch it but can't and that drives me crazy! Sort of like my reunion with Elena or my move before it came, only this one seems to have the power to drive me crazy. Crazy because as abstract as I say this, the truth is I'm miserable having conciously decided not to be with Blair, even if that's totally, encompassingly eronious and irrational. I can't be with someone addicted to drugs. My mind knows this, so why can't my heart and body follow suit? It suddenly cuts deep into the whole of my soul and life to see couples because my love is a dark, dirty shameful secret- and my body literally screams out for him like it would for food if I starved myself that way. But I could never tell my girl friends I'm depressed over a guy like they tell me about theirs. Most of them have no idea I'm even alive or possessed of a real identity that has nothing to do with my abiltiy to read people and events for them. Note to self: It makes me feel dead or dying to be around these people, so I must cut all the ones who don't see me or care to see me off. The ones who do know and love me look at me incredulously if I say I kind of sort of wish I might have ended up with Blair- as if I have to heads or something- and say, "Then when are you gonna stop saying no? When you're a senior citizen?" Too late, I think to myself, deep inside the sweet solitary dark of myself again. I think I might already be senior citizen. Or maybe I'm just a ghost, and life passed me by in the blink of an eye. That's how it feels. I never knew the way I was could hurt me so before. But the fact that I most often angrily shrug guys off me when they say nice things- or dig myself a hole to live in when I get what makes my heart feel complete- makes me feel like my life is fading down the scope of a long tunnel. I can admire the ripples and pretty things and other people having personal lives, but I'm frozen in my aloneness and there's no way I won't eventually fade down that drain. How dare I even begin to dream of some of the things I have been lately. It really must have been some vague false alarm of a dream that I fell in real love and wanted...certain things. Things that are so immensely painful for me to admit even in a journal that they're still too much like ghosts to say refer to them directly. I've said it before. Ahh, whatever, I'm drained and depressed into a tiny corner of myself as it is tonight. I wanted to live with Blair and eventually have kids with him. And I just really need the heartbreak to be over soon. Blair is the person I used to call when there was heartbreak in my life, from other guys or illness of family or friends or just me. There's virtually no one out here in this cold new world that can possibly understand how I feel about him, never mind understand that I can't let him have me for good if he still wants. I don't contain the softness and cotton candy fluff of womanhood- to me, wearing white puffy dresses only alludes to the flamboyant, deluded fantasy that life is a peach or a cruise ship after the honeymoon, and coddling a man or slaving over the stove for anyone but me aren't things that run naturally in my blood. Blair used to laugh at me sometimes when I said I really was not a feminine person and would perfer not to be treated that way in bed, saying with some mock scorn that I was one of the softest girls he'd ever met. He'd touch me with such love on careful finger tips and his voice would take on a peaceful, grounded and serious tone as he'd go on telling me he promised to take care of me like no one else had.
"It must have been years since you cried", he would say, "And I would kill everyone who made you still like this in my arms. Don't you like when I touch you? I know you do. Just relax. You know everything is gonna be okay. We're adults now. All that shit from the past is over. You can be alive with me now, you can do what you want to me." But as much as I wanted to jump on him and fuck him with all the feeling I've never come alive with or shown all my life, I couldn't. I was frozen. I don't contain the soft feminine part inside that would respond well to hugs and comfort, and I couldn't let him find that out for himself. I don't naturally kiss slow or compliment out loud or any of the things women do by default, and it tears me apart to realize. Even when I am expressing the full of my love, I bite lips and make people bleed and fuck hard. Blair had to tell me to calm down. That's horrible and the truth is I'm living in a shadow of shame all the time, wasting my whole life in a search for something I can't find in myself. I'm frozen like glass in the mysterious pain of not knowing I have anything in common with other women, and suddenly needing desperately to know it in order to feel alive.
As glad as I am for my mother that she's found someone who makes her happy (trust me- a real feat for her and something I certainly never suspected was possible), it makes me really sick to hear her rolling around on her bed all night on the phone giggling like a school aged kid so we can all hear. I never want to be all that emotionally stunted false emotional fluff, even if I live most of my life in misery like she did and the rose sheets of freedom are pretty. I've always been my father's daughter. My mother's reactions to almost everything have always been to either scream and cry like a hateful, out of control child or coldly manipulate. My father may have been cold on the outside, but when I was a kid I idolized him because he was warm on the inside and I was the only one who really knew him- because, inexplicable as it was, we were cut from the same mold. And my father was nothing if not honest, so I decided when I was just a seed of a person to never let him see a shadow over my head. But where did that get me, really? I'm lost, I haven't found my own way in personal matters, and all he sees are stormclouds above me. "You want to be an actress? You look good enough..(empasis on the word LOOK, as if the rest of me is lost on him- why are you not in the Guild yet? Good actors aren't lazy. Why are you still sick? Adults get better. That's just life. There are bills to pay. You're stuck, move on. What's wrong with you?" I am twenty-three years old and even the simplest of my excitements- and my days are simple joys if any lately- brings an angry, embarassed flush to my father's face if I show them. He hasn't looked me directly in the eye since I was thirteen, or maybe even before. I realized a long time ago that I'm flat inside and can't be loved the way other women can. It's only just begun to hurt me in a direct way now. I know that probably means I'm growing more mature and don't need as many abstractions, and I'd like to let my feelings flow through me like a back-tracking river now to heal for the future. But I'm in so much pain, I don't know how I'm going to open my eyes each morning. I mean that in an emotional sense. I realized so many things lately and just hurt all over, my past coming through me in chills and sweats.
He would understand this if he were here. But he's not here and I'm being a baby for still needing him. I'm supposed to be a tough person, I always was able to look away from most things and never look behind me when I left something for good...my father would think horrendously of me for this. I feel like I'm dying. Worthless. Living life in a hole. There, I said it. I'm partially unable to be connected to because of the long-standing iron sense in me that if I show my father I can be happy and make it in this life alone, then he'll finally think I'm worth even a mental embrace. I'm not doing so bad. Why does he think I'm doing such shit with my life, throwing it down a hole when I make my own money, have a direction, handle being sick better than he handles a day of the flu, and hold my own emotionally? My direction may not be the nine-to-five job I have at the VNA, but a lot of people's aren't...right? I really could be happy on my own, and that's something I'm really thankful for inside myself- that wholeness and companionship I can find with only me as the road of life twists and turns unpreditably like some fucked-up magical mystery tour. My father sees only blackness and despair where in this grassy tranquil place where I am now. I know I'm standing on the edge of my life and could go either way, could fall off or make it to the other side of my life where there will be- at long last- happiness. I know how severe this place in my life is. How cold and harsh an endless this winter sky stretches out above me, as if its darkness blankets the entire rest of my life. But I can't make any leaps with this grinding pain constantly hauntingand eating me away from the inside, the pain of being a woman who acts like a man. I was taught to be strong. Boys don't cry. And apparently, neither do I.