because it was snowing, and they were bored

I want to throw this paper out, and curl up in a ball, and watch bad t.v. with my roommates. What do people talk about anymore? I cannot seem to remember. I wish they would talk about feeling strange and lonely, but they mostly talk about bad t.v. A suitable substitute, i think. There is only a week left in the semester, and by week I mean three days of finals for me, and then I am going home. I am half filled with excitement and half with dread. This paper is killing me slowly with a hundred tiny paper cuts.
I feel like I'm in a very large office. It's really just a big room on the second floor of the gsu. just hear this and then I'll go. Once a boy sang this song to me, when I was a senior in high school. I'd broken his heart, and he couldn't stop playing it over. And I just didn't care.
It's not that I didn't care. It's that I couldn't. I think. My heart is filling up with snow.
This is a nice place I've landed in, I just don't know why I could never bring myself to stay.

i was there for you when you were lonely, i was there when you were bad

I was there when you were sad.... This morning I woke up at 8 a.m. to write my paper. By ten I needed to take a nap, so I did, and now it's 1130 and I'm trying to understand why it is that I always make things difficult for myself. I think i'm mildly addicted to a drug, which worries me kind of to a large extent, but at the same time all I am thinking about is passing school and getting away away away from here, so it's like the life I'm making here doesn't even matter. I think it's healthy to be ready to build something up and then give it all away, I just can't bring myself to build it properly since the thing I'm building is only going away to people who absolutely don't care. I'd like for this to make sense to at least one person, just one person, and that would mean the world to me.

I'd like to see you but really I should stay away
And let you settle down, I've got no claims to your crown
I was the boss of you
And I loved you, you know I loved you...it's all over now...

And I was there for you when you were lonely
I was there when you were bad,
I was there when you were sad.
Now it's my time of need
I'm thinking, do I have to plead to get you by my side?


I'm going to make a list of good ideas and write them down as I go along, because it seems to me that I never have them when I'm supposed to.

your teeth are white stones in a river bed

Don't sit down and have lunch with strangers, or near-strangers, when you're feeling blue. Just don't do it. This will only exacerbate your sadnesses, make them seem out of hand, so that your blues will seem so blue there is nothing you can do about it.
I woke up and I was looking for you. I was looking for you all day and there was nothing I could find that seemed even remotely like you. But I'm blue so what can you do? Wait for it to pass.
Sitting near acquaintances whom I wish were my friends makes these blues worse. I thought...we could...and then? Nothing. There is no you and I, there is not an us as in friendship. It's all pieces that once were there and no longer fit and I might just leave because of it.

we're kings among runaways...

This is where I was when I listened to this song:
in the rain, in barcelona, as seen from a bus at forty miles an hour on too little sleep and too little coffee. We were homeless, and it was always you and I, huddled in door frames and waiting at the bus stops for someone to pick us up. How is it so easy for me to imagine us as children? Why do I dream you, as I know you, through the phone? As if telephone wires, as if internet photos will ever make up for a real person.
So, how do I miss you?
I couldn't really tell you how. It's like there are no words. Our brains have taken over, taken to each other, and convinced us into love like it's air or like it's water. It's strange, really, to think that this toxic mix of chemistry and convincing evidence could really make for a strong relationship. And yet...and yet... I have to believe that it has. I don't know what else to make of this, then, if it weren't for you, and your face, and everything that I could say I love you about without feeling the slightest hesitation or anxiety about what would come next. Weird.

if i could be sweet

Kailee and I are going for a walk. This isn't significant. This happens almost every day. but I'm trying to walk the line between daily writings and things that make sense and mean something to me, and it's kind of hard place to fit between. This week has felt like a century. Partly because of feeling alone, partly because of living under siege, partly because uninterrupted anger for three weeks is bound to get someone down eventually. I lose my anger very quickly, and my memory is so short. This has enabled my survival and yet also hinders my productivity for the future. Please, I'll never tell you why you're wrong. There are so many reasons. I don't think I have it in me to change people, that's not my job, and has never been.
There's just a feeling in my stomach that things still aren't right here, maybe this is mostly because I miss sophie, or maybe this is just me being unable to speak up yet again. I don't know. I wouldn't publish this post, except it's been over half the month without a word from me, and i thought maybe this blog was getting lonely.

since you've been gone

I haven't worn my ring in two days. It's not like I am married, it's not like this ring means anything to anyone but me. But i was looking for it so many times, i kept going to pull it off to flip it around and turn it over, and I couldn't.
I keep thinking about becoming a teacher. I don't know if this is me, chickening out, signing off from the world of things that make no sense to me or if this is really what I want to do. I'd like to go someplace small, with a few close friends maybe, in the woods in the middle of nowhere and be able to figure it out.

For now, though, i am waiting. I am waiting for the right thing to jump at me and scream for me to notice it.
I am vaguely sure this is not the way to go about doing things.

People can stand outside all they want, looking in, telling me what's wrong. That's not going to do a thing to change me.

Our apartment is approximately seventy five degrees and sunny all day and night long. You think i might welcome this in the early winter months of boston. It's awful. I fall asleep lightly, uncomfortably, sweating with chills from the freezing breeze of my window. I hardly sleep, I have crazy dreams, too much is happening and I am always anxious. I don't know if this is just me, missing deadlines, failing at all sides of every equation or if I am just reacting to the heat. It must be...

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood's The Tent. I am not sure if it was academically well received or even noticed by any community other than the one inside my head, but it sounded a lot like something written close to my heart. Kyle asked me to read to him from my journal, and I refused. I think it's strange that nobody keeps journals. Why is that? How do people go for so long without keeping documents of their daily inquiries? All of my favorite journals have been chronicle books. They did give me a dud once, for which I wholly blame the journal.Though my grandmother died at the beginning of last year, and I am vaguely sure she is responsible for the many strange events that occurred thereafter.
Here is a list of the number of things I lost this year:
a room key
a student id
about six assorted socks from different pairs, creating about six pairs of unsightly un-matching socks
a digital camera
some lofty air-headed goals
my best friend, for a while
my roommates
concentration, sight, vision, direction

Or maybe this is all just the city, this black wormhole of a city. I still think it was the ghost of my dead grandmother, and I'm somehow sure this is all a strange sort of retribution.

Today I watched the boys next door clean their t.v. Well it was one boy. He was very avid about it. Neat lines.

Do you see what this city is doing to me? But where else is there to go? College is the one choice you get with no strings attached. And now it's all me, and there are a million strings, and I can't even open my eyes to decide.

here is the thing they do not tell you:
a long-term side effect is that you might always feel you are outside the room you are standing in. There is nothing you can do to eliminate this feeling, except maybe find others who feel the same way, so you can both stand outside and look in at yourselves looking out.

she leaves through the window, of course she leaves through the window

Last night I saw John K. Samson, and I swear, every time I see him it makes me want to do insane things. I stand there with my mouth wide open and my hands clasped in front of me, he is my elvis and I am his 1950's poodle-skirted teeny bopper. The Weakerthans have been one of my favorite bands since high school and even after their lackadaisical recent album, I am still a devoted fan. Granted the night was strange, seeing Harry and Justin and Bunky in the same place makes me feel like all these different parts of my life are coming together, only haphazardly and too fast. There are x's on my hands to signify my youth. I stole a wristband anyway, or rather, was given one by Harry who slipped his off his wrist.
There are few reasons why I love boston, one of them being that I am actually given the opportunity to see great things if I really want to see them. My life here has been strange, and I always feel like I'm swimming against the tide, but I don't think I would be satisfied any where else. I would always wonder what it would have been like if I had actually gone to Boston, which was where my heart really wanted to go. My heart. How did I get so melodramatic? Am I the only person who makes decisions solely based on what her heart is saying? When did a heart grow a mouth and learn to speak?
The band that opened for the Weakerthans was a group called The Last Town Chorus. It included an adorable girl from Brooklyn and a nerdy sidekick from Sleepy Hollow, NY (represent!). They made me happy, because they seemed real. After the show, the girl stood outside and waved at everyone and everyone walked past her because nobody realized she was the one they were all swooning over not two hours before. But Justin noticed her, and Harry, and they both talked to her so I gathered all my courage and my samson-inspired hopefulness and ran up to her like a psychopath: Do you remember meeting a boy in colorado? You called him adorable? He told me and asked me to ask you but you don't remember, it's okay, he's my friend. You were great!
To which she grabbed my hand, and kissed it, and said "We'll meet again some day." I think she might have misinterpreted me, but i am still grateful for her response to my weak-hearted weepiness.
My parents visited last weekend and it made me unusually happy. Usually after their visits I am disgruntled and grumbling about the many inconsiderate things they had done. I don't know why I do this. I do miss them an awful lot, and think they are unnecessarily proud of me, and I am happy to be able to provide them with something to be unnecessarily proud of. I still feel like I'm doing nothing though, I still feel like I am treading water that is too deep. I thought that would change drastically this year, but lo and behold, with one rejection i am back on the cutting room floor trying to remember what it was in high school that made me so love my school work, so obedient, and so untouchable.
I would like to remake friends with friends I have lost touch with. I understand that sometimes it just isn't in the cards for people, but this always ends up upsetting me. Kyle, I would not have spent six years of my life pining over you if it was all for naught. I don't know why you don't see the end of this tunnel, and I think you are misinterpreting the things I am saying to you. You're right, there are things I will not ever understand. But I understand you, and I understand how I feel about you, and how that is never going to change. If I lose touch with you, i think i will lose everything. I know that's dramatic, but I'm just saying.
I talked to Karlo tonight for an hour. I think he just checks in every few months to renew our friend contract and make sure he is still in my wedding. There is a point of glory in every boy's life... I'm afraid that might be his. But it always makes me happy to hear from him because it reminds me that some people are just going to be in my life forever, no matter if it's a phone call three times a year or if I see them every day. My feelings towards friends don't change, apparently, there actually is something in me that is reliable. Something that lasts.

I climbed a hill, I wanted to look down on you.

I am practicing what to say to kyle, it goes something like this:
I don't care if I ever talk to you again. It's not that I don't love you, it's not that I don't want to talk to you ever again, it's that I am physically unable to care anymore. I know that sounds dramatic, and ridiculous, but I'm not doing this again. And in a way, I want to say, I'm not doing this again, as in I'm going to call you and keep calling you as long as I want. But what i mean is, I am not doing this again. I am not letting myself fall madly in love with you to hear you say there's no point, and there's no future for us anyway, so why do we bother? I am so tired of hearing this. Just because you refuse to say I love you, doesn't mean it goes away. Just because you marry the perfect pretty mormon girl doesn't mean she will make you happy.
I can't care if I ever talk to you again. I just, I can't, anymore.

why don't we just do it in the road?

It's funny that this is where I live.

Last weekend I slept in the bed of a boy I've only known for two weeks. What's funny is that it wasn't the first time I slept there, and it wasn't the first time I spent the night, sleeping, with strangers. I'm vaguely sure it will happen again. The problem with being in a half relationship here is that it always feels like everyone is watching. We turned out the light and the light from the windows lit up the whole room. Across the alley, across the street the apartments made a checkerboard of shadowboxes; each with their own doll-like characters wandering around inside of them. It's nice here, he said, well not out there, out there looks like a third world country, but it's not so bad.
He was nice, I guess, from Alabama with no accent. The city makes lines between us, though, and I feel like I am always watching him from across the street, from behind a window where he has become only a figure in a shadowbox, mimicking the things people do in every day life. They wake up. They sit down. They eat. They leave. And then repeat.
The city has sprawled in all directions, like the sun, my cousin said. The first time I ever came to boston, she said, the streets kind of go out like this, kind of like a sun. I've found that to be mostly true, except she didn't mention how it also made it impossible to navigate, like the streets are always moving outwards, like they'll never lead back to each other. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes I wish it wasn't.
Do we use the subjunctive in English?
Is that supposed to be Sometimes I wish it weren't?

National Novel Writing Month begins in less than two weeks. This is good because I can't say I've written anything in about a year. But I don't want to be that kind of ego; I don't want to develop a kind of ring around my head that makes it impossible to get through doors. I suppose I kind of have it already, though, by refusing its growth I'm really just refusing my own. I think I might go for a walk. It's cloudy enough to be pleasant. Soph hasn't been home in two days and I miss her.

I am practicing what to say to Kyle. Here's the thing: I am madly in love with you. It's really all I want to say. But I don't know if it should be said, since we haven't said I love you really since this summer and maybe he just doesn't love me back anymore. I know it happens. One day you wake up and realize the person sleeping next to you is someone you could never live with and then you're out on the street at six a.m., in the rain, running home. I don't expect anything less from anybody, and I thought at the very least you would know to expect it from me, but some people don't and this always proves problematic.

I've learned so far this year that my communication techniques are lacking, and this makes for very unhealthy relationships.

because my heart is just a muscle...

Thankfully Fran is trying to make my transition into back to school a thousand times easier by being ridiculously cold to me. Saturday morning she told me how much she had missed me, and then, Saturday evening, when I said i was planning on leaving on the tenth she decided to stop speaking to me.
I'd rather she had just yelled at me and we could have had it out, and me crying everywhere, and her feeling awful about it, instead of this persistent, subtle emotional erosion. Both Sunday and monday she has yelled at me for stupid things, and both times i have been to the point of almost crying and then today I ran out when she refused to wish me a goodnight and to my car where i sobbed for the first time in a year. This happens every summer. Something always brings me to tears. And it's usually work related. This is usually the only thing that can make me cry. and then I'd begin to think about all of this summer's sadness and it just kept coming, and I kept replaying the day's most imperfect moments and the corners of my mouth pulled down and everything was coming out. I stood in the back yard trying to force my key into the door, hiccuping and wondering if medhi was in his backyard, listening. And then i stood in the shower and I couldn't tell what was tears and what was water, I thought this would make the blotchy i-have-been-uncontrollably-crying look on my face go away. but it didnt matter because when I got out I still looked like I had just been smacked around by my deadbeat husband.

I don't remember sad things. I do not. It is part of the way I have survived so many years, my impeccably selective memory. Thus, every time I come home I am surprised by how many pitfalls I find myself in again and again, and I am always astonished by my inability to see them coming. I am so good at getting up again. But, man, I am so tired of falling.

It's hard when you're so full up with love that you forget what your hunger is.

On why break-ups are good for the economy

new plan: Spend $150 today on irrational comfort goods.

example:

you got the money, I got the time babe

You think it's been almost five days now, or almost four, I can't exactly count the time between things like this. And there is no between, really, because what comes next is entirely different, what happens after this is something of a different, incalculable measure. And I don't really know what that's like, I guess. My heart is always set on something, and now it's set to burn, so what?

If I am lost for a day, try to find me.
But if I don't come back then I won't look behind me.
All of these things that I thought were so easy
just got harder and harder each day.

And the thing that kills me is that now someone is wetting his pants thinking it's his turn, but it's not, and how do I explain that it never was? So, I can't tell him that I've finally lost to reality, and that for all my dreams and fantastic plans for my perfect future it's finally nothing more than maybe a book, a few pictures, and a box of crap piled neatly underneath my bed that I must search for in order to rummage though.
I want to mourn. I want to curl up into a ball and watch sad movies and eat ice cream, but the weather will not permit. So i lay in the sun and hope to turn into something beautiful so that maybe my body will stop rejecting me so much. This is backwards logic, I know, I also feel like dying my hair again, and getting a tattoo and striking out in as many obscene ways as I possibly can. But I know that will just be a displacement of emotions. And then there are people who are breaking my heart all over again. I do not want this right now, always feeling like i should be apologizing to someone. I am sorry, but not indefinitely, and not for a whole season. I am just trying to make everyone happy, and I am trying really hard to be happy, but I stupidly placed one too many eggs in someone's basket and they dropped it and let them smash all over the floor.

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby, okay?

I just don't know how he sleeps, knowing this was mostly his fault. She did not understand when I tried to explain this to her, and I know she was trying to be noble and a good friend so that she could say WELL, even when i was mad at you I was still a good friend to you. But you shouldn't do things so that they serve to your advantage in the future. I just don't believe in that.
I tried to explain to her that I can't talk to him and not be in love with him, which she did not get. But you'll still be friends right? He doesn't want to push you out of his life? And I don't know how she doesn't know that it doesn't work like that, because my love for him hasn't changed and won't change until I see that he is all wrong for me. Maybe the day he takes me to church and I throw up all over the altar. But when will that day come? I could wait for it, but I could be waiting for it forever.

People will wait forever for so many things. This makes no sense to me. I don't need to wait for things anymore, I am old now, I am tired. I know I am nineteen but you don't know all the things that I know. I feel entitled to a degree after cancer, I think everyone should get one. It doesn't just demonstrate inner strength, you dumb bunnies, you'll learn more in those two years than people learn in a lifetime. I don't know why, maybe I just went through all the hard things first and now all I know is hard things. This life is just too easy for people. That's why they are mostly dumb bunnies.

And I know my insides are too soft. And I know I sometimes can't survive without sleep, and that I am addicted to coffee. And I can't plan seven days into the future, because it's summer and it's sundown, and I get so distracted by beauty that it ruins all my plans. But I don't understand why people can't coast into plan B. Life is made up of plan B's and C's and D's. I am sick of preparing myself for a future created by someone else. I am scared of growing up into a mushroom like my sister will, already excited about the corporate world, as excited as one possibly can be about living such a cushy, boring life.

Well, she tried to shrug, and then too quickly attempted to coax me from irrational rage into calm, pacified readjustment. I can't be angry, and I can't cry. Why are you angry? She asked, but she apparently only heard her own problems through the phone, I said I can't be angry. Oh. She said. Why would you want to be angry?
Because it is easier to be angry, and say how badly someone wronged you, than to say well I am to blame for this too. Which is all I can say right now, because it's true. And I want to sit in a coffee shop all day and contemplate this. But I can't, because I am home, so I numbly sit in my backyard and think about going shopping with my mother and wonder when in the hell did i succumb to painting my nails baby pink instead of some hideous shade of orange, bronze or gold? And how has my body been so ignored for so long that I can barely walk up a hill without being winded? The month of august will be long for me. And I'm going to do what I want. That was the plan all along, but what I wanted was you, and now that you've taken that away from me I will have to make other plans.

I'll be spending the next solid week and then some with just Fran and Sunny. I don't know how I will survive the rest of my year without them, and I don't really want to think about it. Hopefully, it will rain.

calendar girl

"...and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words." faulkner

I think this is all meant to be about how i feel about the world at any given time, so i cannot apologize for the frivolousness of this blog at all. And I won't.

Right now, I am happy. I know this is often subject to change, but even when I am sad these days I am happy just to be alive and sad. And I know it will pass, and blah blah blah, but right now I am just happy. I am grateful for my flowers, and my farm stand, and my love, and my allergies. I am grateful for white peaches, and portulacca, and orchids. My wedding will be full of tiger lilies and orchids. I have to get married in late june. Anyway.
I am grateful for sunshine and yoga and my boring little town. I am grateful that the person I spend the most time with is a seventy one year old woman named Fran. I am grateful that I have the time to not know what I am doing with my life, and I am rolling around in my confusion joyously. What a crime it is to not live joyously, i think, the worst crime. I am grateful that I feel old at nineteen and that I have lived well enough to both learn and forget the words to explain how i feel about things. I am grateful for sheep and farms and sunsets, and bee hives, and water color paints. I am grateful for you, in every way possible.

all the good that won't come out of us

So my life has come down to a forgettable amount of insignificant things. The majority of my days take place in a flower shack in a tiny town, where I observe the most fascinating relationships. And i think, do we look like that? Cow eyes, me, the moon? No, it's not right. I should want this forever and ever sort of thing, I should want him around, with me all the time.
But, no, this is what i want: I want pristine, endless days, where it always feels like the sun is rising. Where we drink coffee all day and eat nothing but food that is weightless and our memories don't bring us down, way back down to nothing.
I've gotten my apologies, and I've gotten my rewards. And now I feel like I'm finally in this place where nothing is messed up, and I can't enjoy it, because I'm too busy messing something else up. I don't live in the real world. I don't want to, I never want to live in the world where a million other people are walking in and out of my space and traipsing all over me with their mislead notions and desperate pleas for approval. I wish they would all stop, actually, because I really do love people, and I know that I have a fiendish capacity for love that has landed me in the most complicated of situations, tangled up in what should be and what is, for all time. I can't say sorry, really, because what sin is rooted by an overabundance of love? And how could you ever apologize for it?
The thing is, small is fucking beautiful, right? And I am fine with my life the way it is now, but there is still something bugging me that I can't ignore, that I could never. I don't know what it is, but I know that I'm laying on the floor of my room right now in my empty house in westchester new york and I am thinking about being somewhere else. Always thinking about being somewhere else, and why is it that I never want to be exactly where I am? Maybe I did, once, but maybe only because i know for certain that that place was fleeting and that to stay was an impossibility, thus I wanted it. Every time i think I have it all sorted out, something else just comes, rising to the surface.

I think I just need to go to the beach.

sorrow on the storrows

The city gets lonely. No more goodbyes to old friends. The car is parked in the driveway. Let's make use of it. We could go nowhere, or we could go city to city. Drive past the old highway because there's nothing left to see. Don't you agree we all are dying? I got some money, you got a pack of cigarettes. Together we'll mend our old wounds and make fun of it. You'll tell me stories to keep me awake at the wheel. I'll drive as far as I can until the feelings become real. Don't you agree we all are dying? We grew up way too fast. A lonely child and a car crash. But I know that we'll be friends until we die. Don't you agree we all are dying? It's time we start living.

-Prom

you say hearts, I think artichokes

I don't know if i could live in a city for the summer. Any city that wasn't forest-based, or surrounded by mountains. Just these last two days, with everyone so hot and crawling all over each other, and laying on scarce strips of grass, I don't think I could stand it for four months. I would rather lay around my house. I would rather go to the park every day and play frisbee in real fields. I would rather not be weighed down by the smog.
Our room is going to be a disaster for the next two days as my roommates move out and leave me here alone, sweating, to study for my two finals on monday. I can't understand that people are done with school, because I've forgotten what it feels like to be weightless.
I had something significant to write about, but i can't seem to remember.

wise words

don't be a hard rock when you really are a gem, baby girl.

lauryn hill

m.f.k. fisher moments, all the time

Escape is not peace, not ever.
Not even for kitties.

but sometimes, there are flowers.

we'll carve new streets and sidewalks, a city for small lives

I had a dream where Brady said "girl, you need to get your butt to chile right now," and it was funny, but then I woke up, and I was still in boston, and it was a disappointment a little.
Sometimes when I'm sitting cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room, watching t.v. and eating pad thai with chop sticks from a tin container I think I am happy. But then I just think, maybe I am happy because I am embodying the caricature of my college self, whom I imagined years and years ago and one day found myself actually alive in some college some miles away from home. The longer I'm here the more I'm convinced this is only half what I wanted.

we say that we'll stay for one more year.