02.16.03
The world of darkness surrounds me
I'm at home for the week. To relax and catch up on reading and go for a run and take a nap every day.
There's always something that changes each time I come home. A new table, or some new towels. But there are the things that always remain the same.
My cat's cries after she has eaten breakfast and wants to get up on my bed, but her hips are too old and arthritic for her to jump anymore, so I have to help her. The salt on the mudroom floor, that needs wiping up every evening. My younger brother's music, always a little too loud for everyone else. The warm water in the bathtub - even though it's not the same bathtub.
Whenever I come home, I always feel as though I need to be here. It helps me straighten out my mind. There are always little deamons haunting me, different and yet always the same. I gain perspective here, and the time to leave always comes too soon. I always want to stay one more night, one more afternoon. But it's the people, it's this house. It's not this place.
I've stopped believing in love. The romance kind. I felt it once, it consumed me, and I've never felt it since. Not the same way. I've felt love that was strong and solid. Reasonable, logic. I was able to let go. No desperation, no deep heart ache.
I've met a boy, and I've let him touch me. But it's not love, it's not even that much like. He's jelous, and tempered, and we bicker like we've know each other for much longer than a month. I've decided not to call him this week, because maybe he's not that great for me. I'm doing this out of boredom, not out of true feelings. And though he tells me I'm beautiful and too good for him, how much he likes me and how he wants to touch me, maybe what I really need is to not get involved with a boy who's too old to have the lack of direction that he does. Who has too much emotional baggage for me to try to deal with, and who's a Capricorn - one of my worst matches.
But I am bored. And it's something to do. Because sometimes I doubt that I will ever love again, like I used to. Because I've become too proud. Words get stuck in my throat when I'm talking to the best of friends, how can I possibly ever manage to explain myself to a stranger. Explain the last 21 years of my life to someone who wasn't there, to someone who will only ever know my stories and my ghosts as fictional. How can you explain the heartache you've felt at funerals and graduations and in hospital rooms, beside someone dying? How can you explain the girl you were before and how you've changed?
How can you explain the way you felt about the first boy you wrote a poem for, or the long summer days you spent in a pool, or in a car smoking dope, or playing with dolls you pretended were Indian babies.
Maybe you have to accept losing yourself. That the person you're going to love can never know all of you. And I just don't know if I'm ready to accept that.
Sometimes it feels like all I want is to be free, and all I am is trapped.
wunderwuman at