I was woken up a bit ago by a phone call.

It was one of the places I have finally been able to discern as familiar and not comfortable.

It has been springing upon me lately, in the occasionally successful attempt to catch me off guard - vulnerable to the pleabargaining of my empathy, my good nature.

I cannot escape it's septic clutching of my understanding. I cannot muster up the courage of a reboot. Of draining the same wounds.

I fear it winds around me. I fear that in this anklegrab situation, my only resource is silence and ignorance.

How dare you say now that you love me.

There is no longer the time nor place for such a thing.

We all meander through lives that consist of windows of opportunity.

When you skip a window, there's no going back, and it's closed.

I have said it was a good dream. Maybe it was only meant for that.

You cannot ever be a safety net. You cannot ever unhurt me.

What I have pledged to is both those things. He is a prop for my growing. An anchor rock for my starfish heart.

He is all that is great and good in my days ahead.

How could I forsake that?

No, the moment I agreed contained all moments.

I can trust him to pull me solidly alongside him. I am a greater person in his presence. He lifts and cradles me.

I didn't need someone on my own plane. I needed a way to grow up.

I would apologize for being myself if it was what made you love me, and what made this hurt you.

But what apology can one lay across the truth? Is it my place to apologize.

You love my possibility. The idyllic way you have painted me for yourself. You loved my attention.

But he loves me as what I am, not as the things I could be for him.

And that - THAT - is a crucial realization.

At this impossible 3 am hour, I can nearly touch the abstractions, it's all so clear.

I do not love you. You are no comfort, no step up into the darkness toward which faith in someone propels me.

You won't find or plant in me that irresolve.

I am not yours. Forever.

From my Phone...

Mellow day. Mayhaps it was even somber... I was too busy not talking and distracting myself to notice which.

And now I'm sitting on a window ledge outside at Borders, waiting for a ride home.

And I have to post this in spurts so my phone doesn't log me out.

Went and saw The Holiday today. I laughed and cried. Then I hated myself for relating to a chick flick. And because now I think Jack Black is mainly obnoxious, and not funny.

Then I walked to Borders, where I spent the day reading graphic novels by Craig Thompson. I really like his style. And his book Blankets is amazing. It moved me.

I want to go home and draw my own autobiographical comic book.

Sketchbook/journals were on sale for $4. I bought 3.

Maybe I'll do illustrated books of my poetry.

I felt outside of myself today. I keep going back to that quote from Everything Is Illuminated:

To write is to have second chances. What, then, do you mean when you say you were born to be a writer?

I have spent the last few years skirting the avoidable centers of my life. Now it's not just mine anymore, and I am plunging headlong into my personal Louisiana Purchase territory.

But it's okay now. I have found my Clark. And we shall explore it all together.

More and more I realize that my life to this point was just building. That the actual living doesn't happen until you're whole. And that you can't be whole until you find the person who completes you.

And while I rejoice in the prospect of excavating, scouting the dense jungles of my future life, I feel I have spent the week mourning my imminent departure from the world I will be leaving on the fringes.

There is much I have not the words, or presence of mind, to clearly articulate to that end.

Today I pondered the subtle, nuanced differences between familiarity and comfort.

And the difference between my then and now is defined by the noise of falling snow on fallen snow.

The sound of a change of heart is just as loud.

You Fi-yahd!

So, childrens. I have returned from hiatus because I have stuff to tell the peoples.

I got fired yesterday from crappy MyFamily.com job. I always hated my job there, and totally knew this was coming, but didn't really expect it to happen around Christmastime, and definitely not for the reasons that it DID happen.

Apparently my old supervisor, and someone who I thought was a friend, has been grudging me for the past few months because I've remained friends with Su and Dan, and she's been totally embittered. (She thought Dan was madly in love with her. She's frighteningly delusional about relationships...) Anyway, my real supervisor was out of town on Tuesday, because she left for Thanksgiving a day early, and Jillian (the girl in question) was subbing for her.

Turns out Jillian's been trying to get rid of me for ages, because all the part-timers liked me better than her. (I'm not saying this to boast, I'm saying it because it's true.) So she makes up some completely BULLSHIT report about me undermining authority and being willfully disrespectful, and that I was browsing the web way after my break. (I had accidentally left the window open instead of shutting it down before I went back to my auditing work.)

She tells Tony (the manager from hell who hates me because I called him on the carpet for taking advantage of the fact that he's on salary and not hourly pay anymore, and that it's ridiculous that he suddenly only comes in for 15 hours a week tops) that she told me on numerous occasions that she needed me to scan the microfilm rescans, which are always top priority. And he pulled me aside yesterday and threw all this stuff in my face. What sickened me was the fact that he looked so happy while he said it.

In reality, all Jillian had said was, "When you're done with that audit, can you come film scan?" ONE TIME. And by the time I'd finished my audit, my shift was over. I tell Tony this. Tony says, "I have to trust my supervisors, or else everyone will think that I'm bending the rules for you, and I can't do that, or no one will respect the rules or me." Apparently he doesn't know that no one respects him anyway. Sigh.

Then they had me go get my stuff, and took my badge and he made me stand out in the snow for 20 minutes without a jacket while I waited for my ride. Wouldn't even let me wait in the foyer.

Now, I've been looking for another job for months, because I knew that Tony's been prowling for an excuse to throw me out on my ear. But to have a person who I thought was a friend, to have Jillian be the one who stabs in the back, at Christmastime, no less, was what hurt the most.

Y'know, I've always been one to have faith in people. To give humanity the benefit of the doubt. Especially here in Utah, with the predominance of a religion which teaches that Christlike attributes and actions are of the highest priority, and that to love your neighbor as yourself is one of the most important commandments. Sometimes it makes me really sad, to see how so many people blatantly and repeatedly say one thing and do another.

I admit that I haven't always been the best person for sticking to my Mormon beliefs. I do swear, sometimes a lot. And sometimes I, myself, can be really mean, but I don't do either of those things and think that I'm still in the right. And I don't go around telling people to be nice and stop swearing.

I suppose it's easy to understand that in a place where Mormons are so highly concentrated, you get a good dose of those who are Mormon because they think it makes them look good. To the point where looking like they live the gospel is more important than actually living it.

And then, when you superimpose that demographic on top of a corporate environment, I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that hypocrisy and politics are even more pronounced. And that someone who calls people on the carpet for that sort of thing, someone who has always abhorred injustice, must have no place there.

Is it like that everywhere? I suppose I will never really be able to find a job where I fit in, because I don't fit in. I never have. I say what I think about things. I say how I feel. I tell people the truth, and never sit idly by while people in authority get away with crap.

But apparently those aren't important qualities. Apparently someone who's willing to take a stand is a menace, and not a help. Apparently standing for truth and justice is something that gets you fired, not something that helps.

It's hard, when your optimism, and your willingness to trust people, takes a hit like that. When you get slapped in the face for trying to be a friend, and trying to make a place better.

I think communism is a good idea, in theory. But I'll never believe in it, or advocate it, until you can prove to me than humanity is incorruptible.

Because at the end of the day, it seems, the liars and the hypocrites come out on top. And either there's something fundamentally wrong with the world, or there's something fundamentally wrong with me having faith in people.

And I'd hate to think that it's the latter.

when you're collarless and abandoned

am i the only person who hates it when all of your little lives don't mesh anymore? the frantic, frazzled scraping of recall, recoil, and redirect?

i have no words lately. which irks me because autumn has always been my writing season.

my true love, the love of my life, the exact mirrored opposite soulmate of mine married my psychotic ex-friend in august because he wanted a different kind of mystery. because he wanted someone crazy to dig and explore who wouldn't dig and explore him back. he wanted a girl who didn't know him. and i don't mean in that way. i mean, a girl who didn't know him for who he is. for what he could become. for where he's been. he knew that i saw him, and loved him for all of it. and in the end, it's because i loved him that he couldn't love me.

but then, he did love me. they all love you. it's why they leave. or so they say. it's true though. they find pieces of themself in you and they love you for it. they love being able to give over some part of who they are and to pick up a part of who you are on the way.

and in the end, we really are mostly the people we've given ourselves to at some point along the way.

i'm rambling. about love. all my friends hate it when i do that. because they think it's drama. and they hate The Drama. but it's not drama. it's just life. and how can you live, and breathe, and feel, and not have intense reactions to the massive and glorious amounts of shite that you wade through?

i don't know. it's just...you get to that place when the one person says no. and you can do nothing to change it, because you've made all the right choices, and when it came down to the pivotal moment, someone else made a choice that completely negated all you worked for. all you built and hoped and dreamed and lived.

so how do you go on living when everything behind you has been swept into a heaping pile of nothing; and your best friend who knew you inside out and vice versa, can no longer talk to you, or interact with you, or be with you in any semblance of pureness - or genuinity - because you both know that all their daily functions are some sort of farce: a lie, a thing that they get to play at because it looked fun and interesting and unknown?

(holy shit, that may be the longest sentence i've ever written.)

so i loathe him for turning me into the jilted bitchy ex-girlfriend. i was miss havisham for halloween this year. in my heart.

how do you work around the empty spaces, when they're so conveniently empty in all the places you need to be building on?

i can't write, because it's empty. i reach into this barrel of...whatever...inside of me, and there's nothing.

where the hell is the barrelmaker and who knows his number?!

Nothing important for me to say, today. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.


Sigh.

Weird vibes lately. Odd, discomfort...a sort of tense, coiled, unsprung torrent of confession? No, not confession. Admittance. Reluctant, but inevitable.

I can't find the words. And it's not me, or Scott. It's him.

He's been writing lately. Posts them where I can see them...and they burn in the scars of the little tear-lines. He always finds a way to discomfit me when I'm at a quiet, sincere, comfortable place.

I'm tired of his haunting, of the way he still sits behind corners and peeks at me, to remind me he's there, in the dark, in the wings.

I know he'll never be on the stage with me again, never again will we stand in the streetlight and look at the tree-branches. Confess dreams and meaning and co-write about the things that we saw together. The things we saw of togetherness in the times we were apart.

I keep thinking I'm fixed, that this jigsaw me is sorted out and showing a nice picture.

I keep forgetting that inherently, a jigsaw will always lie in pieces.

He writes about me in the places she can't see them. He leaves me in the background corners of his life now.

Things could have been so different.

I search, scour my collection of music. Scrambling almost frantically...but everything is quiet. So silent.

And I can't find the right song to sing.


October is almost over. I have a lot of writing to do.



To the morning,

Chels

I do what I can...I work with what I have. My doubt is my passion, and my passion is my task.

+50 points for whoever can tell me where that comes from.


The only coworker I really get along with is leaving me today. But I might be following her to her next job... customer service for eBay™. Heck, it's $15 an hour, full time with benefits, and it's right next to my dad's building, so I can hitch a ride to work with him in the mornings. An hour and a half in the car with dad every day might be a bit painful, but at this point, there's not a lot I wouldn't be willing to do for $15/hr AND the pleasure of being able to run screaming from this place.

I'm going to head outside, since it's her last day, and join her on her smoke break.

Later, kids.


Chels

p.s. It was Henry James.

Current Mood: Pre-sprung, edgy, tense. Antsy, perhaps. Somber, but brewing.
Current Song: Pissing by Low
(Lyrics: I can't see. Sing the darker of pissing on my toes. Knowing what I know I know. I'm waiting like a loyal whore. Under every stone
Lovers sleep alone. Alone. Alone. Lovers sleep alone. Alone. Alone.)
Current Game: KOTOR II
Current Book: Ariel - Sylvia Plath
Current Random Quirk: Sucking on my bottom lip.
Current Obsession: Scott

Today is hard. It's raining outside and it fits my mood, but I don't feel like I fit into my skin and my life right now. Andrea called me this morning to tell me that Su had a miscarriage, and that's why she wasn't at work half of last week. Last week was the first time I heard that Dan had quit all his jobs because going to school for 18 credits this semester at Su's urging is taking up all of his time. He and I haven't talked in a month. He doesn't need me anymore, and it's odd to feel that sort of letting go. It was just wierd, because last night I had my dream again... the one where I'm stuck taking care of their unwanted baby because I have nothing better to do with my life, and I'm the only person out of the awkward three of us who cares about it. It was different than usual, though. A lot darker, more tense and full of undercurrents in the flow of things. Winds of change are stirring mid-October. I love this time of year, because the world turns shadow and grey and you feel every breath and going outside makes your skin tingle. I get my best writing this time of year. I feel like writing something right now, but nothing good will come out. There's a poem stuck in me, and I'm too preoccupied to get it out right.

Last night I went for a walk with Scott, and we talked about stuff. About life. It was our first really serious talk, and it was interesting. He has a lot of the same feelings about things that I do. The same kind of questions, the same kind of reclining doubts. We went to his car when it started to rain, and talking led to other things. I really, really like him, but I wonder if it's just some sort of compensation for the hole of recent pasts inside of me.

Everyone gets hungry for things.

So I took my guitar
and I threw down some chords,
and some words I could sing without shame.

And I soon had a song,
I played it around
for some friends but they all said the same:

They said, "Music's for fools,
you should go back to school.
The future is prisons in math."

So I did what they said.
Now my children are fed,
'cause they pay me to do what I'm asked.

I forgot all my songs.
The words now were wrong,
and I burned my guitar in a rage.

But the fire came to rest
in your white velvet breast,
so somehow I just know that it's safe...

- "Death of a Salesman" by Low

Doooooooooom!

And so the end begins.

Today, in our training meeting at work, they confiscated the use of work email for anything other than work purposes. (The NERVE!) No, seriously, now that they've shot our morale in the kneecaps AND the jugular, all I can do is resort to listening to REALLY LOUD OBNOXIOUS MUSIC ON MY BIGASS HEADPHONES SO ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND ME HAVE TO LISTEN TO IT AS WELL!

Then they'll just say we can't listen to music either. Now, let me tell you a little secret. Chels can't function when set to moderate a single task. I am, by nature, a multi-tasker, especially when it comes to having to do something I care nothing about. For example: the Mexican border crossing records from 1903 that I'm scanning today. If I don't have something else to do, like email people, or draw or write poetry in Notepad, then I will fall asleep staring at this damn screen for five hours a day. And then I'll miss ALL the images that I'm supposed to be monitoring instead of keeping tabs on them all out of the corner of my eye.

I mean, really. and then they wonder why the turnover rate for part-timers is so high. It's because if you're a part-time employee the environment is excruciatingly painful to work in, the fulltimers can IM and email and do whatever they want...

It makes me want to throw rocks and burn things.

No more email? Gee, mister! That's swell.

At least we get free counseling services, I can go whine to someone an hour a week on company money and tell them how much I hate my job, but can't leave until I get a new one. Which isn't going too well at the moment.

[deep angry voice]Damn the Utah job market! You damn dirty job market! Damn it all to hell![/deep angry voice]

BUGGER! I just used up 11 minutes of my 15 minutes break time to bitch about how corporate america is killing my soul, man. It's killing my soul.


Miserably,
Chels

And Now for Something Completely Different

In other news...

I have no other news.







Wait, I lied. I'm going to see Jackass 2 after work today, and I can't TELL you how excited I am about it.

Also, my crush on Syd has expanded by 300%. I did the math.



Okay, so I didn't really do that math, that's just a guesstimate. I don't think it can expand, actually.











There are cartoon pencils on my desktop here at work. Because someone submitted them for the monthly wallpaper contest. Which was instigated to conform all Imaging Department desktops in a spirit of Professionalism.



I am the only employee to be doubled over in pain at the irony of this.



People in groups are morons. All of them. Especially when it comes to voting for desktop wallpaper.



I hate you, coworkers. I. HATE. YOU.




It's still raining. I am in a good mood.













Fine, there was news after all. Don't ask me why I spaced this post like this. I think I did it to make it seem like there's more than there actually is, like when you eat a row and a half of oreos and then spread the remaining oreos out through the box in attempt to dupe your poor, overworked father when he gets home from his day job and wants to watch Everybody Loves Raymond reruns with some cookies.






Not that I've ever done that. Allegedly.













ChelsEdit: Tab THIS, you damn italics!! *face punch*

Nothing bloggy to post today, really...

In other news, I finally saw 40 Year-old Virgin for the first time yesterday. Holy crap, I have not laughed that hard since a conversation I had with my sister that went something like this:


QUOTE (My sister)
"I did not bake the chocolate!"

QUOTE (Me)
"I said take the chocolate, Laura. I swear, you have hearing problems."

QUOTE (My sister)
"I do not have urine problems!!"



Also, if you haven't started listening to Augie March yet, I hate you. You should. They are an awesome band. "Song in the Key of Chance" is on my list of Top Ten Favorite Songs That Aren't By Pink Floyd.



That's all. I'm off to finish my hunt for Deep Purple mp3s.

Avast!

And now, since I'm currently feeling lazy, and this bit of what I emailed to Syd made me laugh, I'm going to cop out and use it as my blog post. Until I get super-bored later and decide to add on to it here and there throughout the remainder of the day. Well, the workday anyway.

Good lord, I'm in a weird mood today. It's sad. In spite of it being International Talk Like A Pirate Day, which is my favorite holiday, I have hitherto spent the day in a rather foul mood due to a long bout of deck staining (nowhere NEAR as piratish as it sounds) which the Mum had me up and doing at 7 this morning. I mean, seriously, if I don't go to work till one o'clock, (13:00 for you people on...whatever that time measurement is called...it's not metric, is it? *Eddie Izzard doing his American impression* "Yah...get outta here with yer goddamn commie metric system!") why on earth would I need to get up at 7?

Besides, I was up until 2:30 this morning playing Mercenaries. I didn't intend to be up that early, but I lost all track of time hunting down renegade North Koreans. I think most of it was due to some subconscious fervor to find and kill the person who's to blame for Kim Jong Il's ridiculous haircut. And even though I know Mr. KJI 's not involved whatsoever in the plot of Mercenaries, I still just got some sort of personal satisfaction knowing I mowed down a lot of North Koreans and probably got his barber somewhere in the mix.

I confess, there's also another reason contributing to my lack-luster piratey mood. I didn't have time to fix my hair today. Because I decided to spend as long in the shower as possible so that I could de-stain myself. And then, I had to throw on the first thing I could find, which turned out to be jeans, my Teen Girl Squad (What's Her Face!) baseball tee, a black hoodie, my pair of ancient Vans, and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beanie. Consequently, I am donning a sort of look I've named "Ubergeek the Gangsta" and that's about as unpiratey as you can get. If "unpiratey" were a word, that is.

And now, I'm here at work, and people keep eyeing my beanie with contempt and/or jealousy. It's not my fault they said it was a casual work environment and we have no dress code. (Well, except that you need to be dressed.) And there's not a lick of anything to do, so I decided to keelhaul you in the bilgewater of my ramblings.



It's the Cheeziest,

Chels

Dad says I need to stop being content with thinking that I'm stuck in neutral when, really, I'm just sliding backwards all the time.

I thought about this.


I though about Yankel in Everything Is Illuminated: falling in love with things he never had because he lied them into existence on some plane of his reality. Re-running thoughts in his head. I am not sad. I am not sad. I had to do this for myself.

I am not sad.


Somehow the sadness is bearable when the rest of the world doesn't know about it. Sometimes we realize that we love the idea of loving something, and we don't actually love the something.

What color is it? It tastes like red. It is red. But we cry, because it's not more red. It's not redder. The red we crave doesn't actually exist.



Volunteer, Dad says. What do you want? Don't say nothing. Everyone wants something.

I want to know what I want. I want to really want something so badly that it motivates me out of stagnation. It motivates me out of shuffling my circles at the beginnings of things.


Just finish something. Find something you can finish, that's not the top score of a game. That's not a book you've already read. That's not re-sorting your CD collection.

Finish something that you can put on a resume.

Finish something that will prove to the other people that you're worthwhile.

Dad said: If I don't come home from this trip, I don't want you to think that I thought you were a failure. I believe in your potential. I believe in your possibilities more than you believe in them.

I can't find love in this language. I'll learn another. I can find any more questions, I just have lapfuls of answers that I don't know where to put.



Get over your instant excuses. Lesser people that you have gotten over harder things than you to do things.

DO THINGS.

Do things you can finish.

Finish the thoughts that lead to motivation from knowing what you want.



Get out of your cave. What do you do in your room all day?

I read. I sleep. I draw. I write. I write. I write. I love things that I feel like I should love.

I love the idea of wanting something you love. I want the idea of something. I want the something of an ideal wanting.

I just want to find what I want. And I can't.

It's in the more red, and I haven't found it here.

And I'm tired of the filler. I'm tired of striving for some interesting melancholy instead of just plain melancholy.



You write because writing gives you second chances. Because writing, in itself, IS a second chance.

What do you mean, then, when you say you were born to be a writer?



Nobody will hire you, or pay you, for half-finished things.


I am only the beginnings. I am afraid of wanting things to the point of being compelled into completion.

What happens at the end? You can finish failure. I am crippled by the fear of completing my mistakes. You can't run away from something you've finished. Finished means a total commitment.


I don't want the things written in stones.


I am dry erase. I am fingerpaint on the tile floor.

See my chalk, my slate layers, peel off and crumble...
...so easily displaced.

Did You Hear the One About...

End of Autumn
Rainer Maria Rilke

I have seen for some time
how everything is changing.
Something rises and acts
and kills and causes grief.

From one time to the next
all the gardens now are not the same;
from the yellowing to the
golden slow decay;
how long that path has been.

Now I stand amid emptiness
and gaze down all avenues.
Almost to the distant oceans
I can see the solemn ponderous
relentlessly denying sky.

I feel a kinship with the lemon peach tree in the backyard; its fruit harvested early, the leaves dirty gold and sloughing off too fast to catch and savour. Too soon for it to collect itself and don some other girding. This past week the wind changed direction and the tree and I have been rendered bare and reaching toward the sky. At our feet lay the million tiny reminders of what we were, and how things had been. Paralyzed in straining upward, someone else must rake up our pieces, or the ground collect and eat them - our past and little lives.

My roots plunge hungrily through the dark underneathing, a search for some meaning in the decay of former selves to feed and progress, to eat in the months of cold and hestitant sunlight. I shiver, exposed, at the touch of the breeze, and ask myself why I could not have kept my green and guarded growth. I ask myself what I could have done to stay whole. I ask the nothingness about change and why it has stripped me naked and set me before the elements. It was not me. Nothing I did has put me where I am now. Each leaf had let go, and the harsh wind swept me of what needed me no longer. Or rather, I am only rid of something I never actually had. The leaves exist in themselves, it seems. Still, I shiver. Still, I reach. Bitter, the growth of a new skin comes only after the long, cold thrash of darkness, of being numb. Soon, my sap will freeze in my veins; my brittle outward self suddenly second to what I am in the earth below that bears, supports, and warms me.

I don't know your face no more. Or feel the touch that I adored. I don't know your face no more. It's just the place I'm looking for. We might as well be strangers in another town, we might as well be living in another world. We might as well...We might as well...We might as well... I don't know your thoughts these days, we're strangers in an empty space. I don't understand your heart; it's easier to be apart. We might as well be strangers in another town. We might as well be living in another time. We might as well... we might as well... we might as well be strangers, for all I know of you now. For all I know.

It's so easy, you see, to imagine yourself sitting in the pieces of things and wondering what you could have done to keep it from breaking. The hard part is realizing that there was no thing to begin with. The breaking of something, I can take. It's when what you were holding so carefully in your hands is suddenly gone. When you look at the spaces it was and realize that it never was. You held it, you touched, smelt, and loved it, and then someone comes and tells you that it never existed. That you couldn't have held it and loved it, because it was never...there. Or anywhere. It's easier to have something broken. It's easier to have something lost. It's the empty that kills you. It's the empty that drains the blood from out the holes that you believed were full.

I used to think that truth was something stark, something stoic...steadfast, immovable. That truth was like a pillar, or a foundation. Then you hit it, and find that truth is more like a bullet train, or a mack truck. At least, that's what it feels like. But it is a pillar, it is a foundation. It is some vast, stark immovable thing. You realize it was there the whole time, and that it didn't hit you...you hit it. And not only do you hurt immensely, you feel a prize idiot for not seeing it there the whole time.

Well it's a lonely road that you have chosen; morning comes and you don't want to know me anymore. And it's a long time since your heart was frozen...morning comes and you don't want to know me anymore. For a moment your eyes open and you know all the things I ever wanted you to know. I don't know you, and I don't want to - till the moment your eyes open, and you know that it's a lonely place that you have run to. Morning comes, and you don't want to know me anymore. And it's a lonely end that you will come to...morning comes. And you don't want to know me anymore. For a moment, your eyes open, and you know all the things I ever wanted you to know. I don't know you, and I don't want to. Till the moment your eyes open, and you know.

The problem is, I was so damn close to hitting the nail...but I was still that crucial bit off, and when the hammer bounced, and pegged my thumb, I was completely surprized. And I cursed my thumb, I cursed the hammer. I didn't curse the fact that the nail was in the wrong place, the wrong wall, the wrong house... you set yourself up for these things, you know. When you're just so cocksure that you're right. That you've interpreted the wrench in your gut perfectly. I got the picture right. I was just looking from the wrong angle. It's never happened, before. Not like this...I mean, sure I've been cheated on. That is a grief that I know, and am acquainted with. That is a failure that I can accept. I expected the disappointment of a broken thing. I never could have guessed the agony of everything - everything - rendered non-existent, and myself rendered cheap and dirty.

It's one thing to be cheated on, it's another thing entirely to find that you have been the tool of his infidelities. It's just what you feel like, too. A tool. And then, oh agony, you blame your goddamn self for it. You cram the hurt into your mouth and suck on it hard, hoping it will stop...that you can erase the hurting too. I have been a lot of things...I've been a fabrication, a bitch, an invalid, a helpmeet, a better half, an evil half, a whole bunch of halves, a student, a drop-out, a lover, a hater, a rebel with and without a cause, a geek, a dork, an intellectual, a poet, a sister, a daughter, a friend, an enemy.

I'd never been an unwitting mistress. It's a new taste.

Do you know what it tastes like? It's foul. The putrid aftertaste of food-poisoning vomit when you've eaten at a second-rate Chinese hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and then - to go a step further - the only thing you have to clean that taste out of your mouth is feces. You feel like drinking bleach, or Pine-Sol™, or having someone scrub your soul out with Comet™ and a toothbrush. And you didn't even make the mess.

The worst of it comes when your empathy makes no exceptions for the situation. When he calls you crying, wanting pity and a warm embrace and every fiber of your heart is screaming to give it back, to stop his hurting. Because you yourself are so accustomed to hurting; you know it. And that it's no big deal if you hurt, you just don't want anyone else to. And then you ache not only for yourself, but for him. While you're force-fed shovelfuls of reality, empathy washes it down with pint after pint of a blind pity for the captor, the villain, the beast, the lie. And then you fight not only the pain, you have to fight yourself. You have to fight the nurturing aspect of yourself that only wants to fix and help and love. The parts of yourself that still love him, because they feel sorry for him, because they know him well enough to understand the why of things.

You realize that in the moment you feel the weakest, the worst, the most wretched, you have to be strong. You have to finally - finally - take a stand for yourself. And swear you won't let it hurt you more. That you won't cave. That you'll do something for yourself, because you respect yourself the way he didn't. That you honor yourself, the way he didn't. That you have faith in yourself...the way he didn't. That you love yourself. The way he didn't.

Then you are left alone, in quiet and aching, and your imagination wanders to what-ifs. And you fight it away from them for as long as possible, but they come in barrages, and your walls have already been broken. What if I had still been sick...still am sick? What if this had been the last year I had or have, and six months of it were stolen from me? What if I had known about it all along, and the truth wasn't a surprise...would I still have traded the fucking love of my life for the fucker of my life? I wondered about Dan. I wondered about what could have been, with the kinks ironed out, if I hadn't been so distracted by what seemed so genuine at the time. We talked this weekend, and cried a lot, he's having such a hard time now that Su's gone psychotic and hallucinatory on him again, and he talked about how he went for her because everything I'd done told him he'd never get me back. And I let myself be angry and sad - in the middle of the night, when I could be angry and sad no one would know....

So many what-ifs. So many hard, sticky places you can't let yourself sink into. You have to keep moving. You have to pick out the things that you learned and can be grateful for.

Do you know that line that Muzzy says to Millie, in "Thoroughly Modern Millie" starring Julie Andrews? It's a ridiculous movie, really, but over and over I've been thinking about the line...where she's talking about her deceased billionaire husband, and how she found out he was a billionaire. He'd given her this giant emerald brooch, but she'd thought it was green glass. And she loved it, because she loved him. One night she let her friend borrow it, and her friend happened to be dating a jeweller, who was aghast at the size of the emerald, and told her what it was. When Muzzy found out, she was heartsick. She didn't want her husband to go to jail, because she'd thought he'd stolen it. She took it to him and told him to take it back. That's when he told her he was a millionaire and not a thief. Then Muzzy says to Millie, "Now, Millie dear, I prefer emeralds, I really do...but we could have made it on green glass."

We could have made it on green glass...just don't tell me that it's an emerald, when it's not.


It was a lesson I needed, about honesty, about the crucial aspects of truth and integrity.


And in that moment I realized something... I need to apologize.

Andy, I'm sorry. From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry for what I put you through, and I can only hope that you'll forgive me, and that we can be friends. Because I miss being friends, and I hate to think of what my anger and my misunderstanding has done to what was one of the best friendships of my life. I'm so sorry. For everything.


Experience is a bitch of a teacher, but it doesn't mean you won't learn things. It's a hell of a method...the test first, and then the lesson.

But it sticks, and you remember it.


God, do you remember it.

Good Advice

Also, something I found at work today...

a helpful message from an old British Telephone Directory:

Special Hugs

Oh sure, you'll all read when I post crap about me and my sad, sad life, but the minute I ask for money, there's a stunned and awkward silence all around the room.

'At's bollocks, mates. Total bollocks.

Eh up, cock? It's Monday. And the mother of all Mondays to top it off.

I have divulged my last, great, hyperpersonal secret to the one person (perhaps two) who will abuse their new profound(ly dangerous) knowledge to the fullest extent possible.

Perhaps I am as stupid as I occasionally convey myself to be.

At any rate, I don't see any functional walking in my future. Someday, perhaps, I will share this story with you.

Today, though, I will share the story of:

Melanie the Freakish Bosoms Girl™ and Special Hugs in the Elevator

I was at the office a few weeks ago, heading down to a meeting on the ground floor of our building. I get into the elevator with Matt and Nikki, coworkers of mine. There's this other girl in the elevator. Melanie. Melanie is...she's one of those special people who...is special, and...has a sweet spirit. She also has like, size QQQ bosoms. And she is not a small person. She's married to another coworker of ours, Damon. Who is a VERY NOT small person.

And she felt like sharing important things with me, right? Right.

So I'm standing in the elevator and feeling kind of awkward. The doors close and suddenly she looks and me and goes, "I'm soo happy!" I pretended I didn't hear her, because I don't do well in social situations, let alone awkward elevator social situations. I'm also hoping to God that neither Matt nor Nikki decide they are curious, and fall for the bait.

Melanie pokes me and says again, "I'm soooo happy!" I smile grimace politely and nod my head. "Oh really, Mel? That's good. Why are you so happy?" I say in a nice, polite way.

You'll never guess what she said. It was the craziest thing ever, and I totally almost exploded trying to hold in my laugther until I could get a decent distance away to not seem terribly rude. She giggles - her voluptuous endowments heaving in a Richter 7 fashion - and says to me:

...

...

"I was talking to my husband this morning, and he said that when we get home from work we get to special hug.

...

...

...

Maybe even twice."


THE END


In other news, I wrote a poem, but it's prosey and WAY too understandable, so I'm not sharing it, because it's not time. And no, it's not posted on my blogspot blog, so don't go scrounging for it elsewhere.

I'll post it eventually.




Maybe even twice.






I'm soooo making a t-shirt that says, "I need a Special Hug."

My friend Seth thinks I need to find a new job where I'll be happy. No wait - he thinks I need to decide on a career path, instead of being in perpetual limbo. Those were his words. Then he gave me several suggestions: trucking or the mafia. Or selling porn on the internet.

Seth has three jobs. He works as a chef for a catering business, at an opthalmologist's office, and as a graveyard shift counselor for troubled teens.

Actually, what he said was if I stopped being so cynical and pessimistic, I might settle nicely into a normal job and NOT hate it.

This frustrates me, apparently everyone I know thinks I hate what I do.

Andrea and my brother were talking about this the other day, she told me. Well, actually they were talking about my blog. And my brother was like, she just needs to find a job where she can blog all the time, then she'd be happy. And then he quickly edited himself, and said something along the lines of: "but then she'd have to blog, and that would make her hate it. I mean, look at her illustration major. She loved art, loved drawing, decided to do it for school. Suddenly she hates it because she has to draw all the time."

Gosh. Be iffy on choosing a major and people think you're indecisive and troubled and don't know what you want.

I didn't want to continue my illustration major because art was something I loved. IS something I love. Somehow, I knew in my gut that if I tried to do it as a career, I would hate it. I would never draw for fun anymore. I would run screaming if people came at me with a sketchbook.

Doesn't anyone understand that? I didn't want to cheapen my completely pristine love of art by commercializing it. I want to "do art" for the sake of art itself, and not for a bottom line or an angry boss or a demanding client, because then it suddenly loses its inherent nature of being art. It's not art anymore, it's a product. Something in me regards my talent in that area as precious, and turning it into a product...cheapens it. And because art is, by it's nature and mine, intrinsically a part of me and who I am, and therefore I feel cheapened. I feel like I'm turning this gift that I have into something...superficial, insubstantial.

Can this make sense to you?

I suppose it's a self-imposed theory that I apply to everything and - can I tell you? - that I don't mind at all doing some menial thing for a menial job. Because the thing is menial itself, I have no problem with it being cheapened by the fact that I'm doing it because I've been told I have to. For someone else. For money. It's something that I'm not attached to, and therefore I have no problem whoring it to the masses.

Maybe that's it. It's just my anti-corporate attitude that needs adjustment. I'm not anti-corporate, though. I don't throw bricks through the Walmart windows, or leave their carts upside-down all over the McDonald's parking lot. I understand that people need things, and that money helps with that and that if we didn't have some sort of capitalist economic system in place most people would be worse off, in theory, because people are selfish slimeballs.

I don't hate people either. Let me clarify. I hate people in groups. I hate people en masse. I hate people as a "society," or as a faction, or as a "community." I love people as a family. I love people wonderfully as individuals, for their inherent uniqueness - nay, divinity - as a person, as a perspective, as a sentient being. I love people. One at a time. I hate people as a "public consciousness."

A group is as smart as it's dumbest member. (This is true.) And there are some awfully dumb people out there. Additionally, many dumb people are unusually loud and vehement about their imbecility.

I dunno. Maybe I am cynical. Maybe it's because I know too many people who treat other people like crap and it's skewed my world-paradigm.

I want to write. I know that for sure. I want to write because words are...words are all-encompassing. Words are like people. And I don't mind selling people to people. I like words because they operate in a structure or outside a structure, and you can make them as conformist or as individual as you want them to be, because either way they have to be filtered through you and in that process of filtering they become yours. I can share words with people. Millions of people can use the words that I use, but none of them will string them up exactly the same way that I do.

But you know how I feel about words.

I've been reading Lenin lately. I don't know why. Someone once gave me a copy of his writings a long time ago, I think it was my World Studies teacher in 9th grade, Mr. Willey. He's one of my heroes. He, if anyone, would be the reason if I ever become a teacher.

Anyway, Lenin... Interesting character, that one. I enjoy reading Lenin because it's fascinating to watch the way he stumbles into truth.

"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle," he says.

I love that. You will be miserable if and when you have nothing to fight for. In the midst of all his cries for political (don't worry, I use that term lightly) revolution, he says so many things that can impact your state of being, if you'll excuse the pun.

I dunno. Read Lenin. Ponder individuality. Don't be miserable. Fight for the things you love, and love things that are right and good.



All the great ones were writers in some form or another anyway...

Soooo...if I get the chance to get on the computer at home today, I drew a comic strip in church yesterday (that was decidedly not churchy) because I was bored, and because Seth told me to, which I will scan and post up here, because I think it's delightfully tasteful and well-drawn.

But I shan't spoil the surprise until then.

Andrea's dog Princess died. Along with her childhood, and the hope that Jed will ever marry her.

Stupid Jed, I wish she'd just tell him. It's been three damn years, it's not her fault he's a little lot thick.

Sigh.

We made Su's bridal shower invitations. You have never seen anything so vomitatiously Victorian and over-the-top IN YOUR LIFE.

I'd wager.

I make a mean tom ka gai, I have discovered.


Somedays, even my lucky rocketship underpants don't seem to help.


Next week I get the house to meself while the fam goes up to stay in a condo at Bear Lake for vacation, because I said that the best vacation for me would not involve screaming children and lots of water. Last time I was Bear Lake I nearly drowned anyway. (Seeing as I was three...)

Besides, I have to be home, because I'm hosting Su's damn tea party at my freaking house.

And it's cheaper than paying to kennel the dog for a week.


That's about it. Chels is officially emotionally empty. As you shall see by my comic, if I get to scan and show it to you. I have... da mad draw0r sk1llz.

I hate Mondays, Garfield.

One wound up punch of intuition lays flat my whole take on us. You're the girl on the wing of a barnstormer, the tidal rabbit who came of age before her time. We could have been so goodnatured if I'd relented when you insisted, but we've been backed against nature's walls far too long.

You felt abandoned by me, I recall the sunshine as you were melting, and though the comedy softens the fall they still hear us with their ears to the wall. I sold all my evil motives, no icicles stuck in my hide. I'm through with riddles, I know we're little...just help me feel warm inside. Before we take this ride and let it slide into the cracks where fall and winter collide.

I surrender all my gall in a song of modern love. Remeber you're the one who summoned me above any other kind. We could have been so good-natured if you'd relented when I insisted we take a week off, let the garden grow by itself and let the gluttons fill themselves with all the worst of the gory nineties. And though the comedy softens the fall, we still fall short.

You felt abandoned by me, I recall the sunshine as you were melting, and though the comedy softens the fall, they still hear us with their ears to the wall...

I like that line a lot. The sunshine as you were melting. The comedy softening the fall...hilarious, the tragic ways we trod. Too funny, the millions of times we are fooled, and fooled again. Is it ever real? One wound-up punch of intuition. Sometimes that's all it takes. Sometimes it's more than enough, as each little jab and poke does the job acutely enough.

I'm not paranoid. Not really. I just...know things? They fall: in the spaces between words, on the eyelids of each downcast look. How stupid, stupid to ignore them. That small, familiar twist in the gut from background voices. And then? Another year, the doctor says. Another problem. You can't leave, you have to stay. For months, you stay. Aching just to leave, to see. To be hurt again, more. I hate my wording. I can't wind it tight enough in prose, but the poetry is so hollow these days. I force myself to write them about feelings I force myself to have, and they come out...forced.

Suddenly I come out feeling unattached - detached - and restless. Compelled toward moving. My brother reminds me there's no progression in comfort.

Growth is hard, uncomfortable. And I hate it. I am tired of growing. I am tired of so much. Of this...waiting for you, for this impossible reassurance of things.

Oh, the little parts of me break so finely along miniscule lines. I watch them weaving across my arms and up my back, slow-spread spiderwebs of blood and understanding. Resolve. Girl inform me, all my senses warn me your clever eye could easily disguise some backwards purpose. Do you harbour sighs, or spit in my eye?

The blocks I'm building with have numbed my senses. I am fumbling in the dark, for some warm thing to hold on to, and it keeps moving further and further away from me.

And none of this, even, makes sense. It's just me, some self-important meandering enigma that wastes your time with the words that I try so desperately to make mean things.

Doted on like seeds planted in rows, the untied shoelaces of your life nurtured all year then pressed in a book or displayed in bad taste on the table. Problems arise, and you fan the fire while there's a wild pack of dogs loose in your house tonight. Cut from bad cloth, or soiled like socks, add it up and basically people never change.

They just talk...and make plans in the dark, or make haste with ideas that can't help but creep good people out. As you talk to me too much you're assuming we don't always want what's right. Did I strike the right set of chords? You're annoyed.

The goal is to ignite you then move on. You feel ill at ease, you've got no squeeze. And the wisecracks won't make you more stable. You've learned your lines to scale and to time. Why must I remind you now I'm only less able? Cut from bad cloth, or soiled like socks, we're ordinary people we can't help but to change as we walk, and make plans in the dark, or make haste with the boy who can't help but creep good people out. As you talk to me too much, you're assuming we don't always want what's right.

Two fallen saplings in an open field. Snow padding gently on an empty bench. And old woman's jewelry lying unadorned. Cold nesting robins allied for the first time. I know when you hear these sappy lines you'll roll your eyes and say, "nice try."

It's short today. I feel quiet and stand-offish. I keep trying to write, and it keeps coming out all the same.

desperate,
four-day affair.

you know nothing of
your rivals.

a dozen blind struggles
to make him search
the cracks in the walls
and remember.

you hoarded
the keys to this life,

the gold-plated things
you have marvelled.

some celibate lies,
you're always the first
to fall off
for the dregs in the crowd.

Old friends are coming home. Seth and I made sushi and played Battlefront II for 5 hours last night. It was the most fun I've had in...years? Perhaps.

I keep finding realization around dark corners, like the crucial aspects of things that I miss when they aren't...here. I need it.

I need more close to me.

You say the hill's too steep to climb. Climbing. You say you'd like to see me try. Climbing. You pick the place and I'll choose the time, and I'll climb the hill in my own way. Just wait a while for the right day. And as I rise above the treeline and the clouds, I look down, hearing the sound of the things you said today.

Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd. Smiling. Merciless, the magistrate turns 'round. Frowning.
And who's the fool who wears the crown? Go down in your own way. And every day is the right day. And as you rise above the fearlines in his brow, you go down, hear the sound of the faces in the crowd.

Do I feel fearless? I've been wondering this week, weaving thought around the subtle difference between a lack of fear and the overwhelming presence of apathy. I think that I have the latter, mostly. And in the apathy, I lost my fear. Or, rather, I can't feel it. I don't care to.

My emotional body has been numbed, and I'm not sure why. I had such a rushed past month of overwhelming emotion, striving, I think, for a semblance of some good thing in all the crap that kept hitting me, and something in me broke. Or closed. Or decided that the occasional good thing wasn't worth all of the garbage...it's easier to feel nothing than to work so hard trying to feel good. Or at least, better.

Especially when it doesn't come.

Don't ask me to leave you and turn back. I will go where you go and live where you live. your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.

Do you know what else I've been pondering? Loyalty. Not in the smarmy, buy-a-bumper-sticker-for-my-country, sports-fan-enthusiasm, go-my-alma-mater kind of way. I mean loyalty in...love. But not like that. Not love-love, but..compassion? It goes beyond that. Not charity, not goodwill, not concern. It's...loyalty that I have a problem with. Goethe once said, "He who does not feel his friends to be the world to him, does not deserve that the world should hear of him." And I do, girl howdy, I do. And none of them seem to understand the depth of what I can give, what I do give.

I cannot help it. If it's asked, I will give it. But oh, the agony of spending so much of life giving away yourself with such unwilled, yet hapless, abandon, and then to wonder why it never seems returned to you in quite equal measure.

There are just some of us who, inexplicably, have this gargantuanly proportioned capacity to give and love and be. I don't know why, I don't know how. I can't hope to explain it clear enough for you to understand. (But then, understanding is such a irregular, immeasurable thing.)

I don't know. The more I think about my unconscious willingness to exasperate myself with such violent loyalty to the people I care about who number in spades, the more I wonder if it's me trying so desperately to give people something to need me for, because I wonder, to myself in darker moments, if I'm worth having. If I give people any semblance of value, when I see so little of it inside of me. I can love you, it's the one thing that I know how to give. I have to love you, because it's easier to emanate love outward, than try and find the small space inside of me that's not willing to hold any part of it for me.

If you need me for it, then you will keep me here. And I like to be kept. It's the one thing that I want, really. People who will just keep me.

This is the story of your red right ankle and how it came to meet your leg. And how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangled, and how the skin was softly shed. And how it whispered “Oh, adhere to me, for we are bound by symmetry and whatever differences our lives have been we together make a limb.”

This is the story of your red right ankle.

This is the story of your gypsy uncle you never knew ‘cause he was dead, and how his face was carved and rift with wrinkles in the picture in your head. And remember how you found the key to his hide-out in the Pyrenees? But you wanted to keep his secret safe, so you threw the key away. This is the story of your gypsy uncle.

This is the story of the boys who loved you, who love you now and loved you then. And some were sweet, some were cold and snuffed you, and some just laid around in bed. Some had crumbled you straight to your knees; did it cruel, did it tenderly. Some had crawled their way into your heart to rend your ventricles apart. This is the story of the boys who loved you.

This is the story of your red right ankle.

I think that's the hardest thing that I've had to deal with lately, as far as the whole Su-Dan marriage fiasco goes. Dan was my best friend, for the first time I had given myself, my friendship, my concern, everything completely, wholly, genuinely. And then had to watch it all cast aside. He knew that if anything happened with him and her, that we could never be the same kind of friends, and he did it anyway.

And that, most of all, has been the hard bit to swallow, that me - real, sincere, seriously vulnerable me - was worth so little to him. It's like being flayed open with a knife that you gave them. I handed him all of my insecurity, and he used it to peel me open, and show my fears and doubt back to me in a way that has, for all intents and purposes, nearly crippled me with a loss of..confidence? No, mostly just a loss at the desire to be so open again. I have to retreat into hiding, and wait for my skin to grow back.

But then, I seem to go through this every time.

And that is what I mean. All this giving, this loving people. It's work.

Oh, how it's work.

Shut out, pimpled and angry, I quietly tied all my guts into knots. I gave up trying to make them, figured it'd take them too long to look up. Besides, it was undeniably clear to me. I don't know why. When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters, I knew what worthless dregs we all are then.

Lucked out, found my favorite records lying in wait at the Birmingham mall. The songs that I heard, the occasional book were the only fun that I ever took, and I thought I would make it myself. Yeah, the trick is just making yourself. But when they're parking their cars on your chest, you still have a view of the summer sky to make it hurt twice, when your restless body caves to its whim and suddenly struggles to take flight.

Three-thousand miles northeast I left all my friends at the morning bus stop, shaking their heads, "What kind of life d'you dream of? You're allergic to love..." "Yes, I know, but I must say in my own defense it's been undeniably dear, I don't know why."

When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters, I knew the worthless dregs we are, the selfless loving saints we are, the melting, sliding dice we've always been...

I mean, come on, the best laid plans of mice aft gang aglae...

"Johnny's always running around trying to find certainty, he needs all the world to confirm that he ain't lonely. Mary counts walls, knows he tires easily.

Johnny thinks the world would be right, if it would buy truth from him. Mary says he changes his mind more than a woman, but she made her bet even when the chance was slim.

Johnny says he's willing to learn - when he decides he's a fool. Johnny says he'll live anywhere - when he earns time to. Mary combs her hair, says she should be used to it. Mary always hedges her bets. She never knows what to think - she says he still acts like he's being discovered.

Scared that he'll get caught without a second thought. Johnny thinks he's wasting his breath trying to talk sense to her. Mary says he's lacking a real sense of proportion. So she combs her hair, says he tires easily.

Johnny's always running around trying to find certainty. He needs all the world to confirm that he ain't lonely. Mary counts walls."

Odd, sometimes, the way you slip without knowing it, then wake up and find the hollowness in your voice that wasn't there before. The echoes of untruth in the background of the words you spend so much time building.

For a while, you feel something. And then you convince yourself to maintain the feeling and the something slips away, and then suddenly you feel nothing, but the convincing, and the doing, and the saying is such a habit that you can't stop. And the something, when you look at it now, isn't the same something that you saw worth building a feeling around. Because now it's not something idealized, washed with some rose-coloured paradigm of hope and dreaming. It's something real. Something that can be broken, that dulls in the harsh light of truth and circumstance.

Perhaps it's the same thing. But the somethings are not the same, and the somethings are what you tied your feelings to.

"I was just bony hands, as cold as a winter pole. You held a warm stone out, new flowing blood to hold. Oh what a contrast you were, to the brutes in the halls - my timid young fingers held a decent animal. Over the ramparts you tossed the scent of your skin and some foreign flowers tied a brick, sweet as a song. The years have been short, but the days were long.

Cool of a temperate breeze from dark skies to wet grass. We fell in a field, it seems, a thousand summers passed. When our kite lines first crossed, we tied them into knots. To finally fly apart, we had to cut them off. Since then, it's been a book that you read in reverse, so you understand less as the pages turn. Or a movie so crass, and awkwardly cast, that even I could be the star.

...Over the ramparts you tossed the scent of your skin and some foreign flowers tied to a brick, sweet as a song. The years have been short, but the days go slowly by, two loose kites falling from the sky drawn to the ground, and an end to flight."

How do you find and label the time when you realize that you can't keep doing the things you've been doing? How can you identify the moment when it's not for anymore doing, but done. That you finished whatever chapter of your life you've been writing and building and breaking and manipulating and playing with so fascinated and sure. How does the unsure creep in?

Maybe I let it. Maybe with the wavering, the uncertainty, I left a door open, and it just came. And then, instead of kicking it out, I listen to it. And what it says makes so much sense in the dark,and in the corner, and sometimes in the lightest part of the middle of the room.

"Cough and twitch from the news on your face and some foreign candle burning in your eyes. Held to the past, too aware fo the pending chill as the dawn breaks and finds us up for sale. Enter the fog, another low road descending away from the cold lust, your house, and summertime. Blind to the last cursed affair, pistols and countless lies. A trail of white blood betrays the reckless route your craft is running. Feed till the sun turns into wood, dousing an ancient torch, loiter the whole day through and lose yourself in lines dissecting love. Your name on my cast and my notes on your stay offer me little but doting on a crime. We've turned every stone, and for all our inventions, in matters of love loss, we've no recourse at all."

How long have I been doting? Losing myself in lines trying to explain it and me to myself? To rationalize away all of the small things nipping at my heels? I cannot continue running with bleeding ankles. I cannot continue this road more-traveled.


Where is my yellow wood? Where is my diverging?

"Our despair is domesticated and gives us peace. Only hope remains. Wild hopes, their screams shatter the night and rip up the day." - Yehuda Amichai

Shattered nights. I've been building piles of crumbling emotion around the shattered nights I've been wading through. Shattered by hope, it's an interesting idea. How often the compilation of big dreams becomes the weight we break our backs to carry.

I have been thinking. A lot of thinking...about...things. Can I explain it? Can you hope to understand, and...if you did...would it really matter? Would any of it really matter to you, and make a difference?

They flutter behind you, your possible pasts...some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost...She stood in the doorway, the ghost of a smile haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign. Her cold eyes imploring the men in their macks for the gold in their bags, or the knives in their backs.

I've always loved that line, the imagery and way it's worded: "The ghost of a smile haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign." Can't you see it? It's a perfect image. A sad...image. It's a good simile. Normally I don't like similes. Don't ask me why.

Somedays my life is a pile of disjointed quotes whose interplay and relationships only make sense to, well, me.

Oh, it's been tempting. So tempting this past week. But I will let it waver and settle in the amber of uncertainty until it becomes tepid and hard, and I can chip it out and throw it away. Or against something, watch it, too, shatter. Explosions into a thousand shards of each thing I tuck away with a doubt and a whimper. Some days I am amber-full, like an old tree, hoarding the pieces of things caught in my slow-to-change way. Maybe some day I'll find them again, and hold them up to the light, seeing them in a different way that the one they've settled in so comfortably now.

"Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone." - Gertrude Stein

I struggle in the quagmire of wishing it all knew what I meant. What I know. Of knowing what I wish it all means. Of meaning what I wished it all knew. It only winds tighter the further up and further in you go.

What do I mean? It breaks so easily along the weakest lines of things. When you move enough times in, over, across, beyond, through some things, you only weaken them. And they will fall apart. It's not that you intended its breaking. It's that you loved it so much it could only ever be broken.

"A reassuring platitude: "I love you" became the constantly-handled coinage of a relationship daily devaluing itself."

I wrote that once, in a poem. I don't know why it keeps coming to the front of my mind. Swimming somewhere in all the doubt and the ether.

My room is finished. The walls are painted, the furniture is back. It's gold as gold as gold as gold. With a red dash here and there. The new bamboo blinds are hung, and hanging. The light breaks through them into a plethora of filigrees and falls across the bed that finally has a frame and isn't on the floor anymore.

In my rush to get to work this morning to log out of msn messenger, which I realized I hadn't logged out of on Monday, I left my cell phone sitting by my bed. It hasn't been used much lately, and I suppose it was just...something made suddenly forgettable.

I brought my music, but the batteries are dead.

I had a five-hour conversation Monday night with someone I don't know. It was fun, I had forgotten how enjoyable it can be, discovering a person, some new perspective that breathes and sees and owns a life. Something that at least for now is not at all a part of yourself, of the world that you've built around you.

I take comfort in little new things, when the old ones have found their place and there's room for something else in the compartments of my attention.

My gamer pride was stabbed, gutted, and devoured in the flash of blinding light this past week...

I am not as good as I think I am when I'm alone.

Which, I suppose, has far more implication in every other aspect of my life than I give it credit for.

Perhaps that's a meaning I don't know yet. But it's wedged itself in rather uncomfortably. And I will stare at it, annoyed, until I can learn to understand it, and accept the fact that it's there.

Perhaps that has been my problem all along.

Don't ask me why I write these things. It's something I have to get out, put down. Sometimes it makes the sorting of answers easier, and sometimes it only gives me new questions.

"While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words, dying to believe in what you heard, I was staring straight into the shining sun."

At least the Floyd will never leave me.

Odd, the-off weeks when the lightning of change forks its way through your soul and leaves you singed and electric. That's how I feel.

I feel like I keep clawing my way through distractions, because it's easier than staring at truth in all its bared-teeth and snarling glory. How bright and hollow the grimaces of our dreams can be when you meet them unexpected around a dark corner.

I have five minutes to crank out some semblance of a cool blog post. (Okay, fine, it doesn't need the semblance of cool...like any of my other entries fit that category...)

I hate my job. Truly, I do. I've been such a slacker the past couple of weeks, coming in late and leaving waaaaay early, just to spare my coworkers the problem of me punching them all. In the face. Till they're not...alive anymore. And it also spares me from gouging my eyes out with a plastic spoon. I need to take up...I dunno. Spearfighting.

Some people need to go get an ice cream sandwich. I mean new job. Chelsea needs to go get an ice cream job. I mean sandwich. I mean - d'oh.

My room is officially half-painted. And completely clean.

I'm actually thinking of selling my KOTOR games to get some new ones because I have no money.

AND...

I'm going fishing this afternoon because they've finally changed the fish licensing, so that it doesn't expire Dec 31, but one year from the day you bought the license. WHICH IS AWESOME. Because now I can fish all year. Instead of just for 6 months, which is what normally happens.

Did I mention I hate my job? I do.

It was such an odd dream. I can only remember it in snippets. Dylan following me home one day, me completely unaware...In no town I've ever been in. I had stolen two axes from a firetruck at a crash scene because some crazed insurance salesman had purposely ran into one of his clients for some reason or another, and I THINK Dylan had been hanging around watching the scene, and happened to see me. He kept calling me, and I pretended to ignore him, just to see if it would irritate him. I ran (the axes gone now, no idea where) to this brick townhouse, in the front door. The main floor of it was some sort of art gallery, and my apartment/room was in the basement, where I kept all these statue things I was working on. The game was to hide from him, so I ran down the back stairs into my apartment, and locked the door. There was something I didn't want him to see...I didn't want him to see me the way I was...which was odd, because I don't remember anything being different at all. There were lilacs growing in a corner of the room, and it was messy, because of all my projects. Anyway, he suddenly comes in the back door of the apartment and knocks over all these statues that I had just finished arranging...OH! And there were suddenly these two creepy ex girlfriends of his there in the basement, and they were all yelling at me, and shoving my stuff around while I was trying to fix the ruffle on the hem of one of the statues that had been broken, and he took my hand and was like, "let's get out of here" and we ran upstairs and suddenly all of these people from church were there in the gallery, and there was this weird party going on, and he was still holding my hand. A bunch of my old friends from high school were there too...old boyfriends, and Dylan and I went from table to table, talking to them, introducing them all, and I was happy, and everyone kept saying how happy I was, and David Bowie was performing a small cafe-esque type of concert on a tiny stage at the back of the room, and even HE noticed, and decided to take pictures of us. And Dylan kept pulling faces and making me laugh, and he never let go of my hand. We were talking to my old boyfriend Dave, and playing a game or something, and he was like, yeah, but he's not as hot as I am, and I was like, whatever! And I made Dylan take off his shirt to prove it. And I was right. We left Dave and Collin, I think it was, and walked around...and he gave me a piggyback ride and we went outside and there was like, glitter in the air or something, because everything was sparkly, and it was late sunset and we were in a park and everything was green and orange and purple and red and glittery and we laid down on the grass and watched the sun spin away from us as the world threw itself into the stars.

And I know none of that made much sense. But it does to me, because I can still see the images in my head. It was a cool dream. I woke up happy, if not a little weirded out.

So yes. That was the most eventful thing that happened to me this weekend. Other than painting half of my room and then sleeping in it with the door shut and no ventilation, which I think contributed to the oddness of the dream. I wrote some poetry, but I don't have it with me, so I can't share it. I will post it later.

Meanwhile, I'm at work, pretending I don't hate my job and humming along to my rather loud music.

In other news, random Chels quote from class today:

So, the question was: What gives you the right to write poetry? How do you start a poem? What do you have to say that is more interesting than the process of the paper's creation?

Nothing does, really. I write because I have to. In my life, only two things are imperative: to breathe, and to write. T.S. Eliot once said that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

I can't remember who said it, but one of my favorite poetry quotes says something along these lines:"A poet is someone who, in a lifetime of standing in out in thunderstorms, manages to get struck by lightning seven or eight times."

At the end of the day, I don't know what gives me the right to write poetry. I do know, however, that the desire to write it, for me, is insatiable. I am continuously compelled into some form of verbally constructing my life, my keen feelings, my moments of glory and agony, into something solid. Something I can wrap my mind around, and feel pour out of me onto the page. For me, in so many ways, writing poetry is a kind of exorcism. Of coping. Of reaction. Of catching the smoke of subconscious thought in my fingertips. It's gold-panning for the occasional eternal ideas that so often in life lie just beneath the surface of things.

If I cannot tell me to you in some distilled and simple way, how will you ever hope to know me?

Yawn. Today is my last day of my stint as a temporary full-time employee. It's been three months, and I can tell you right now, I'm wholeheartedly sick of it. Sure, the money's great, but when you have no time for anything but your job, you realize how much life must blow for your dad, or your other friends who seem to work ALL THE TIME. It's been impossible for anyone to play with me, and I miss my friends. Hooray for having the afternoons and evenings back to myself. At least temporarily. I think it's time for Chelly Bean, here, to find herself a new job.

Go figure it happens the same week I finally get the last of my music collection downloaded to my iTunes. (Can we say junkie? I'm currently at 84.6 straight days of music, capacity-wise.)

Rhino is hiring currently, and I like the idea of working retail at a game store, however, I'd prefer to be accepted at Gamerz Edge (poser name, I know) which is a local gamers "mom n' pop" if you will. I mean, since I lost the ability to hang out at the D&D shelf in Media Play when they went out of business...I figure I'll take the next best thing. I dunno. I should check out the old record store and see if they need some summer help. That was the best. Nothing like a discount for a music addict to get an adequate fix and still afford to pay the phone bill.

Yawn. 2 more hours. Then I can go home and play Fable. I can make it!

Ummm....let's see. I didn't write anything new. Though there was a lot of revising old poetry. I'm trying to put together a manuscript for a book which I've apprehensively entitled "Mercurial." It'll be mostly comprised of my favorite pieces from the batch I wrote during a rather emotionally telling previous relationship. It's at least the most complete body of work that I have, because it's a time period with a definitive beginning, middle and end. I'm working on it with my poetry comp. professor, who has been an invaluable resource as far as that goes. She stretches me with my work. A lot. It's great.

Went up to Grandma's yesterday, and helped put in a sprinkling system. Girl howdy, with all the yardwork I've been doing these days, you should see my guns. I'm ripped - and better - tan. Woohoo! However, I'm totally aching, because I got to be the trench-digger. I should have been in the army. Or a migrant worker. (I think I'm going to hell. It's my Utah-native elitist white republican fear-of-diversity upbringing. (Are you Hispanic or Illiterate? Oh wait...) <--- SEE?!?!? I can't help it. ERRR I could, but choose not too. I mean, why quit if you have a good excuse? lol)

Anyway, yes. That's it for now. Not much else...oh, one thing cool - we went up to the Logan Cemetary to leave flowers for my two Grandpas and Grandma, and my 4 uncles and aunt and everything. It was really cool. I was talking to Grandma (the one who's still alive) about what it was like to lose 5 babies to stillbirth. And she was talking about the amazing lessons it taught her and as she barely finished talking, some guy about 50 feet away, who I hadn't noticed, started playing "Scotland the Brave" on his bagpipes. It was awesome, because my Mom's family spent 5 years living in Scotland while my Grandpa built churches. I have decided that the bagpipes is one of my very favorite sounds in the world, and I REALLY want to learn how to play them.

Last item of business: X3

I hated it. It made me want to punch people. And I spent the whole movie with my friends telling me to stop crying and yelling at the screen, because the actors couldn't hear me. I you have any sort of affection for the real X-men stories, don't see it. It's not worth the money. Sigh.

Short Round

Synopsis: Hate job. Feel like crying, don't know why. Also feel like hitting things. Probably more likely to hit things. Starving. Grabbing lunch, and then heading to class to once again flaunt my poetic genius (<-- facetious).

More on this later.

Um, I don't have much to say. Today is better. However, I'm broke and need gas for the scooter. Yes - I'm so broke that I don't even have the three dollars required to fill my tank. Plus I have to run home before class and print off some homework, which I have yet to do still. But which I'll probably do once I get back to work.

And for my notorious SPF, I would just like to say, you have not been a jerk. I have been rather jerkish. Not just to you, but to every aspect of my life in general. And I know it's not PMS, because that was two weeks ago.

I think I'm being devoured by my writer, and when she roars into such prominence, I withdraw and lash out. For that, I am sorry.

It is hard. So much hardness, so many rocks I seem to notice in all the wide open paths. I had forgotten the difficulty of these things in longs months of misty nostalgia. In regret, and disappointment.

It is worth it. But it is a hard thing.






My problem is that I seem to do so well at running when things get hard. And I don't want to run, but it just seems to happen.


Hold me, even when I say I don't want you to. I need you so much, to keep me here. To help me see.

It Won't Hold No Milk

Sigh.

It's one of those days, you know. Been one of those weeks, actually. The sense of settling into contentment with some aspect or other of your life that really, you shouldn't be content with. At least, not content with leaving it as it is, instead of elbowing it into some semblance of progression.

I spent the weekend baking cookies for sad friends, beating Republic Commando for the umpteenth time. Scrubbing a bathroom that my sister had supposedly cleaned all last month, but sure didn't seem that way.

Then yesterday, I had to give an impromptu Sunday school lesson, because I thought that we split lessons by odd/even numbers, but apparently it's split on the every-other-Sunday basis. So... last week's lesson was an even number, which is what I usually teach, and it was Mother's day, so no one was in the singles' ward, because we all went to church with our families. And I just figured that I got to skip a week, which was fine by me, but it turns out I was wrong.

And what was I supposed to teach about? Judges. From the Old Testament. However, apparently I'm a marvelous teacher because the lesson turned out fabulous, and I am a genius. No, not really. Well, I just felt like I was standing up front babbling, and wondering to myself why I was talking, and confessing to any number of heinous stories from my past... but at the end of the lesson, this guy, Irving, who doesn't come to Sunday school much, came up to the front while I was erasing the board and he gave me a hug and said that he was so glad that I taught today and that I had said some things that he really needed to hear.

Can I just tell you how satisfying it is, as a teacher, to find out that what you're doing actually touches people? I love my calling. I love teaching Gospel Doctrine, even though we're covering the Old Testament this year, and it's usually a bugger to help people understand or motivate them to read. However, not only am I an exceptional teacher, I happen to be a master chef, and for all intents and purposes, I could get them to memorize War & Peace for my cookies if I wanted to. So who says that God doesn't utilize ALL of our talents? Hah.

So, at least the spiritual aspects of my life are doing spiffy. They'd probably do better if I could curb my swearing, but at least I don't swear when I'm teaching. And I've done a good job the past couple of weeks of keeping the words in my head, instead of streaming out of my mouth. Which means I'm pretty much screaming obscenities constantly in my brain, but at least no one can hear them.

This past week really sucked. I mean, honestly, it did. And I don't really know why, because it wasn't like some great, traumatic crap happened. I think it was just a whole jumble of little grievances that by Saturday turned out to be one big hairy Ball o' Grief. Do you ever feel like you have so much you'd like to talk about, but you don't know how to word it, or who to tell it to? That's how I feel. I feel all... knotty inside. And I can't untangle it because I don't have long enough fingernails, or a fork handy, and all the people who keep trying to help me are just making the knot tighter and bigger and more frustrating.

I feel like I'm missing some crucial person in my life at the moment... the problem with that being the fact I don't know who the hell it is.

There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza. A hole.

No Ideas But In Things

This week, I've been pondering somewhat extensively the poetry of William Carlos Williams, one of my most favorite poets. I want to share with you the pieces that my attention has been focused on the most:


A Sort of Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless
-- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.




The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens



The parenthetical aside in A Sort of Song: "No ideas but in things" is the part of Williams's writing style that gets me the most. That makes the most sense to me, and it's evidenced in the poem The Red Wheelbarrow. Because The Red Wheelbarrow is not about the wheelbarrow, or the rain, or the chickens, per se. It's about the first two lines. The opening line makes you peel open the layers of rain and paint and feathers to find out just what is being depended on. Wiliams believed in the straightforward conveyance of imagery to tell meaning without actually telling the meaning. I remember a quote by May Swenson, a poet from Logan, Utah, which talked about symbolism in poetry, and how it's crucial to explain your symbol explicitly, but to never tell the meaning. You can hint, but you cannot tell. I will have to search for that one, it was a great quote, and I hardly do it justice.

I have found, for me, that I prefer to convey the meaning of metaphorical images, instead of actual images. Instead of finding the meaning in the small rock on my windowsill that says "compliment" in black letters on it, I come up with metaphors for possible meanings, and compile them. I am fascinated by imagery, but I am equally fascinated by metaphor.

For me, the beauty of poetry lies in its ability to communicate things depending on the reader's perception. In a very real way, almost like scripture, you get out of a poem the things you bring to it. The wonderful thing about poetry is that it waits for you. Novels don't; characters change, but a poem will always wait. I love poetry because it's rereadable, because it's vague. Because you can empty your pathos into its cup, and only those who identify with it can drink it in its entirety. But then, poetry is things you communicate to be related to. We write to know we are not alone, just as we read to know we are not alone, and love to know we are not alone. Poetry it not about loneliness, it's about solitude. It reminds me of one of my very favorite Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes:

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intelligent life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know your duty better than you know it. It is easy, in the world, to live after the world's opinion; it is easy, in solitude, to live after our own; but the great person is the one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

For me, poetry is exactly that: the independence of solitude kept in perfect sweetness. Though, admittedly, my poetry is not always sweet, it is, in a vitally real way, truth of feeling. I write what I feel. I write how I feel, things that make me feel. Poetry is about relate-able feelings. About communicating the unique perspective that you, and you alone have. I share my poetry to connect with to people, and to have people understand and relate to me. Poetry casts light on things we keep hidden. It whispers our inner screams to the passersby.

Yehuda Amichai once said, "Our despair is domesticated and gives us peace. Only the hopes have remained. Wild hopes, their screams shatter the night and rip up the day."

No ideas but in things. The challenge: be an observer. Look for the meaning in things. Only by setting down the very fundamentalness of things can we truly split them apart in detail and understand them.


And now for something completely different:

It's been a long week, and it's only Tuesday.

Yesterday I got The Office (BBC version) on DVD and watched the first season. But it was only on the first episode of the second season that I realized Dan is Garreth. They even have the same freaking haircut. (Nearly) It was the rendition of the Muppets' Mahnamanah song that made me finally realize it. Because Dan comes into work every day and sings that song. It freaked me OUT, dude. Pleh. Posers.

Today I feel...blah. My poem is being critiqued in workshop today, and I'm feeling rather trepidatious. Also, I'm wearing a shirt that says, "Don't Make Me Get My Wookie" on it. And I decided that it's a good thing I'm wearing a jacket.

It's so nice outside. I want to go outside and play. I want to go up the canyon by the water storage tank and roll down the huge grassy hills. Or throw rocks at the tank, because it's makes the coolest ping-y Star Wars™ blaster-fire noise ever.

There are some days when I really miss being a kid. I miss only having to worry about penmanship homework and complaining about bedtime and vegetables. I miss playing red rover. My cousin and her husband just had a baby recently, and he's the tiniest, perfectest thing I've seen in a long time. So much dark hair and dark eyes and he's just gorgeous. It made me sad. Sometimes I really, really want one of my own. And lately I've been wanting that a lot. I suppose it comes from being the oldest of 6 kids. I've been a "parent" since I was ten. And now that the youngest is turning 5, I miss having a baby around the house. I dunno what it is.

All my friends are getting married. It's getting really annoying. I think that inadvertently, I've surrounded myself with an inner circle of friends who are all pretty much bound and determined to remain single - mostly because they all love each other and it's a mess. It frustrates me. People in general have been frustrating to me. I don't seem to be able to relate to anyone around me.

Okay, so what really frustrates me is that because neither of them can relate to me completely, they'll totally misread anything I do. Anything I did. And I want to punch them. In the face. Until they're not alive anymore. I loathe the way they'll fondle their damn egos with the thought that I even care like that.

That is the most frustrating thing. A misinterpretation of sincerity into some grotesque parody of my intentions.

Oh well, if anything, they deserve each other. The more I've gotten to know them, the more I've realized that they don't have friends, they have toys. People are good, as long as they're usable. Once they don't know what to do with you anymore, you're made to walk the figurative plank at knifepoint.

It's all just....so painfully funny. Watching them insist time and time again that real, genuine feelings matter sooooo much, and they turn around and EVERYTHING they do screams the opposite.

It's disgusting to me, to watch these things, these people, these one-time friends dissolve themselves into something so shallow. However, it's a morbidly fascinating kind of disgusting...to watch them using each other. Because that's what it is. That's all it will be. Is it wrong to hope he knocks her up so they both get a faceful of reality? Because I do. In the maliciousness of my occasionally angry constantly-broken heart.

They like each other because they're dangerous, that's all. Eventually their interactions will dissolve into resentment and loathing, and I will sit quietly in the dark and resent the fact that I'm usually right and never listened to.

She's like fire. Like a raging prairie fire, and I am one of the many things she's burned. And just like fire, it's her everyone rushes to, to control, to put out. And I am left behind. I feel so...tossed aside. Even my friends, my real friends, my BEST girlfriend - has spent more time at her side than mine in all of this. Supporting her. And...I resent it. It breaks my heart. I can't stop crying about it.

Said best friend dragged me to lunch with her today, and surprise-surprise, Su and Dan are there too. I hate the way they all act like nothing has happened. Like my feelings, because I don't like to make them so readily available appearance-wise, must not mean anything. That because Chelsea always has to joke about everything, if we joke about all of it, then we can have a good laugh while she's bleeding to death under the table.

In all of it, I think I resent Dan the most, but I'm taking out my frustration on Su, because she's the one who weasels her way into every relationship, every friendship, every interaction between people. I hate Dan for the way every girl is the same to him. I hate him for making me feel so easily replaced. I feel cheap. I feel, betrayed. I feel so unspeakably mad at myself for the way I was suckered into thinking all his schmoozy talk actually meant something at the end of the day. That his fluffy ideals actually played some small part in his actions and real life. I hate the way I finally trusted someone, and he took the opening (the state of willing openness that he had no IDEA how long it took me to achieve) I gave him, and flayed me alive with it.

Can I explain? I have no words for this hurting. I have watched un-anesthetized as my worst fear was gouged into me. Cut me to pieces. To finally give all of me, just me, completely open and honest to someone who I was sure, was SURE would appreciate it. Who would love me, even just as a friend, and finally understand. But he didn't. Doesn't. And I have been so wrong.

It's not that I love him - I don't. Not like that. Not the way that everyone is assuming I do. That somehow I feel so upset because Su has "stolen" him away from me. It's not that at all. I resent Su because she was how Dan proved to me that he was nothing I thought he was. That neither of them were the friends I thought they were.

The hard thing is knowing and caring more than they do. Is knowing that for all of my love, support, understanding, and genuine concern, I get the teaspoonful, while gallon after gallon is poured over the people who don't know it enough to appreciate what it is. What they have. It's a lack of desire for understanding, that makes me break so completely the relationship in my hands. I was willing to be there for you, but you will not use me.
This is the only thing I require.

"Tomorrow is a new day, with no mistakes in it." - Anne

The hardest part is trying to find the courage, the faith, to pick up each re-shattered piece and begin again.