love letters to strangers

And I wonder what it is that makes this okay in my book, walking this line, knowing full well there is no net below.

How did I get here? Am I so wretched, to be so easily forgotten? Happily, maybe, too? I don't know.

The longer this goes, the more it hurts. And I'm too prideful to say a word, knowing I was the one wronged and still feeling like the one to blame.

And every minute leaves me tearing one more piece of me apart, trying to find the bad parts. To have history repeated so many times, there must be something wrong. I must be doing something wrong. But then I cut out the bad parts and there is nothing left.

I guess I'm just a wicked girl. I guess I don't care. I guess you don't either.

It's just as well.

It's just me now.

the weight of the world sits
on your soft shoulders
and still, the skin on your hands
grows papery soft

 Hello, Friday. Let's snuggle.

 I am listening to too much sad music.

I have felt closer to myself than I have in a long time--not to say that I have not been me, just that I feel more comfortable in my skin, more happy with the person behind the person.

I wish I knew what else to say.

Life keeps moving on whether or want it to or not.

And still, I keep dreaming.

Maybe someday I'll dream so hard that it will all come true.

It's as if there was a whole jar full of fireflies and I left the lid open. And now everything is out, not nearly as stunning in the daylight, and my jar is empty.

I wish I could explain this feeling, this sense of unease. There is a humming deep inside me that gets louder every day, announcing the arrival of something so different that I can't even begin to predict what will happen.

I can feel it.

Maybe it will pass.

I wish all my dreams would true. I wish this itch on my finger would go away. I wish the journal I cary around with me hadn't become my journal of Really Big and Unattainable Wishes. I wish every wish in that damn book would come true. I wish Ted Kennedy hadn't died. I wish they'd leave Michael Jackson to rest. I wish I was stuck in your head like a song you can't stop singing. I wish that my house was made of gingerbread.

I am never satisfied. Always, always I have one eye on the thing at hand, and one eye on the peripheral. I am always looking for the newer, better thing.

I am not sure I know what it means to be sated, or what it means to really love. It has been so long since I have felt much of anything, as if my purpose is to be the unfilled void. My purpose is to be empty, with the hope of someday being filled. I don't know what it means to not want, to simply be sated.

I don't know.

August is a terrible month for me. Everything unravels and is put back together again in August. 

It has been a rough week. And it's only Tuesday.

Tonight I trapped a fly underneath a soda can. It's sitting beside me fighting to get out.

And I'm just letting it fight.

Man, what I wouldn't give for some sleeping pills right now.

Or a whole six pack of beer.

Or a club to the head.

 The 5 people I would most want to bring back to life--but only if I got to talk to them:

1. Jesus
2. Ella Fitzgerald
3. Amelia Earhart
4. Martin Luther King, Jr.
5. John Adams

I am doing an okay job of keeping my head above water these days. Out of desperation I've thrown away some things that, small as they might have physically been, began to weigh so heavily on my body and mind that I could no longer keep them.

It is hard to let go. It is so, so hard to let go.

But there are only so many times that I can hear that I am not wanted. Eventually I have to throw in the towel. 

It's been a day of strange happenings. 

This month is full of change. August is always full of change.

Please, God, let some of this change be for the better.

I'm one beer in with sleep nowhere in sight, having come to the conclusion that my job is making me miserable. No, no--that's not right. My job is making me BATSHIT CRAZY. All I do all day is think about work. When I go home, all I can think about is work, how much I hate work, and how much I wish I could quit.

It's times like these when I think I need to reassess what is important in life, and if I am doing what I need to do to be happy.

As of right now, everything is ass backwards. I am living to work instead of working for a living with no relief or letup in the progress of things anywhere in sight.

Obviously, it says something if I'm bitching about work at thirty minutes past MIDNIGHT on a Saturday night. Obviously there's something wrong with this picture.

There is something wrong with this whole thing.

I am not one for making goals, but this one needs to be set: I must find a new job by the end of the year. No excuses and no exceptions. It's new job or die.

New job or die.

I don't care about Russia magazine. I don't care about the heat. After a certain temperature it's all miserable. I don't care about Obama's approval rating or how his wife's hair is styled. I don't care about Mischa Barton. I don't know who she is. I don't care about Beyonce or Neyo. I don't care about Friday. I don't care about the itchy spot on my finger. I don't care about the weeds in the lawn. I don't care about the e-mail you just sent me. I don't care about the friends you've been with. I don't care about this.

I'm so sick of the hypocrisy.

There is no fixing this. I feel as if we are both the badly-broken results of a bad accident. Will we heal? Yes, but we'll never walk the same. And should we happen upon one another in some chance meeting, who is to say how we'd feel or what we'd do?

You are not the person I know. I am not the person you thought you knew.

Do we sift through the wreckage or do we throw up our hands? I'd fight for you if I knew how or what you wanted. 

I feel emotionally homeless these days. Is that weird? So many events over the past few weeks have sucked any caring out of me. That internal part of me that gave a flying fuck never worked very well in the first place, and now it's just plain stopped working. 

I want to care, I'm just too lazy to.

I'm at a point in my life where I really do see the pointlessness of the rat race--the job, the settling down, the children, the family. What for? So that you can spend 60 years of your life doing the same thing, day in and day out?

There is so much more to be had in this world and I want so badly to be out there living in it. I don't even know what that "living" might be, but I'm not sure I'm doing it now. Being stuck in a dead-end job with no other concrete goals in life does not a living make.

I want so much more for myself--and it's not necessarily about success or making money. It's about being happy. And I'm not happy right now.

There isn't anything you can do in this vicious world...

 You deconstruct yourself one piece at a time, pulling away the parts, unscrewing the bolts, popping out the rivets. What is left at the center, a heart? Nothing? 

I need to explain that I keep other online journals. This journal, however, is private and as anonymous as I can make it. With that said, due to recent events, this will be my home for a while. This means that you, dear reader, will be subjected to more of my mundane ramblings, those trite thoughts and things I share with friends but try to avoid here.

You, dear readers, are the only friends I've got left. Since we're such good friends now, I've decided to share the following items. Feel free to skip over this portion of the post, as it won't matter much to anyone--including me--in the long run:


1. I bought the most bitchin' nail polish today. O.P.I. makes a shade called Midnight in Moscow and I'm just a little bit in love with it's "I'm-dark-red-and-brown-and-purple-ish-but-so-fucking-dark-that-I-look-black" hue. 

2. Typing with wet nails is a challenge I have eagerly met.

3. Work is brutal. It's always brutal, but it's moreso than usual.

4. I am not sure what life is trying to tell me when I loose two close friends but gain an amazing lady friend. I don't like the implications, but love them just the same. I am full of conundrums tonight.

5. Tomorrow is Friday. Let's celebrate.

6. I've discovered Salem, Oregon and have decided this is where I want to live someday.


Okay, feel free to wake up now. I hope you enjoyed your nap.

On a closing note, summer is slow to get here this year. I'm thankful tonight for the fact that it's essentially mid-July and I'm still able to sleep with the air off and the windows open. I'm thankful for the dog curled up against my side, for the red-black of my nails, for the smell of patchouli, and the promise of a love I can almost taste.

I wanted to write a million nasty things about you today, wanted to tell the world that I compared you to that awful smokey smell that's left behind in a house after a fire. I wanted to post in every public place imaginable that I WAS AND AM SO HAPPY WITHOUT YOU. I wanted to post a million pictures of my smiling face with people you'll never compare to. I wanted to open up the door to my world just enough for you to look in and wish you hadn't been the jerk you tried to be.

And then I didn't.

I didn't do those things because I don't need to, because silence is a response--the most powerful response a person could possibly give another person. And wouldn't I rather that you stew in that silence? Wouldn't I rather revel in the thought of you wondering what I'm doing or who I'm with? Wouldn't I rather NOT sink to your normal level of behavior?

Yes, I think that's best. Because after you write such hurtful things about a person you deserve to sit in the corner with your consequences.

I need to be done with this. I need to be done with thinking of you and all the ways I could make you sorry for what you did. I'm sure you're sorry enough.

I'm sorry, too. But not in the way you think. 

"Life knocked me off my platforms
so i pulled out my first pair of boots
bought on the street at astor place
before new york was run by suits
and i suited up for the long walk
back to myself
closer to the ground now
with sorrow
and stealth"
- A.D.