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.

It's not really wanting alone time, per se. I mean, the last thing I want to be is alone, which is why this week is hitting me so hard in the first place. It's more of a...I just want to be away from the people who don't fully understand and appreciate me. I don't want to spend time with people who are going to hang out with me and then be so glad they get to run off and do other things with other people who are more important to them.

I dunno. I'm just feeling so bitchy lately, and I feel bitchy because I feel needy, and I feel needy because I feel lonely, and I feel lonely because I am. Ha. Something along those lines...only with far more stuff in the spaces between the periods and the next words. I was cleaning my room this weekend, and I found the old letters that I'd thought I'd lost in the bottom of my desk drawer, and being a girl, I had to do the stupid thing and go back and read them all. And it...walking through all of their old rooms in your heart...the places you lock away and vow you'll never go back to...I walked through them and it ached, tore at me. And it wasn't what was there that did it. It was what once was there.

In the empty spaces between things I read my laughter, and my happiness. Our laughter and happiness, and I sobbed. I was mad at myself. Rereading the stupid things I said and did. I was mad at the person who I was a year ago. I resented her for not seeing what she had, and where she was, for being so self-centered and fake and at the same time being so painfully genuine. I look back now, from a perspective that's been polished and cleared by tears and trials, and I see it for what it was. And part of it for what it could have been. I gave myself to him in the most literal figurative way possible. I cut my heart out and gave it to him, and for a while he held it. For a while he wanted it, and it meant something to him. And I had to take it back, because I saw that both he and it were strained, and that it was my fault, and I thought if I could take it all back and put it all back and patch up the holes, that things would be just as they were.

I was wrong, and I've spent a year reading my mistakes between each stitch of regret, forgiveness, and release. Each seam in the sewing up of an old life to give it a place in this new one. And it's hard, because I didn't know what to do with him then, and I still don't know what to do with him now. He just is. This disjointed part of myself that never quite fit, and that probably never will quite fit...but it's a part that I wanted - and a part that I still want - with me.

Sometimes it's funny how a thing as beautiful as memory can sting you. The burn, the lump in the throat, when you see an old movie, hear an old song. A joke and you laugh, because he would have laughed. Because he would have rolled his eyes. Because he would have seen it with his eyes shining. And I don't get to see it. I don't get to hear it. I don't get to be a part of that as the me I am now. It was with the me who I once was. Who I once tried so hard to be. I don't mourn the loss of her. Or the loss of him. I mourn the loss of something that never was, and what never could be. The loss of redoing something because you think you know what you would have done. What you should have done. The loss of being able to go back and make the now something different. Make it something better, brighter, cleaner...new. The loss of rediscovery. The loss of a friendship, a friend; an opportunity to approach a once-inextricable part of my life with a shiny new sincere comfort in myself.

It's just something that I have to do. I have to go through the rooms. A spring-cleaning of the heart, if you will. I have to take down the pictures and hold them and see them and wonder. I have to dust the shelves, and pull down the books and leaf through them. The memories. The poetry. The conversations. To re-taste, to smell again, to once more finger something I cherished. Something that was an invaluable treasure to me.

I know it probably doesn't make sense, and that you probably don't understand. It's hard for me to understand it myself. But I have to do it. And I have to sit up at night and write about it. To lay awake at three in the morning on a Saturday and remember what I used to do. It's a re-feeling that purges. That purifies. In a way, my going back each time is the way that I have to destroy it enough to let it go. If I return enough, it will lose its novelty. It will lose its meaning. It's value. And when I no longer have to go back, because it means nothing to me, then I can let it go. Familiarity breeds contempt...I must make myself once again familiar with my ghosts, so I resent them enough to no longer cry when they leave me.

In other news...let's see. Not much to tell from Chel these days. Still working. Going back to school this spring, and then I'm transferring out to Hawaii this fall, if all goes well and according to plan.

Woof. Hawaii...that'll be the furthest away from home I've ever been. But I'ma learn to surf, and find me a Tongan. Or I'll run away and get shipwrecked on some desert island, because I've always wanted that to happen.

Anyway, I picked up a book yesterday at Borders that I had been meaning to read for a long time, and I read pretty much from the time I got home, around 2 in the afternoon, to the time when I fell asleep unknowingly, and woke up with my lamp still on and my candles still burning and my face stuck to my book at 4 am.

Something about the whole idea of the book keeps winding around my heart and squeezing it rather uncomfortably in all of my sensitive, insecure places.

The book is about love. It's about love that spans anomaly, time, and absences; it spans infertility; huge age differences that weave back and forth uncontrollably.

If I tell you the title you'll laugh that I'm so affected by it, because it seems such a ludicrous premise for something that has shaken me. But it made me ponder things...mostly that empty half that sits beside me day in and day out. That gnawing sense of one's incompletion.

I don't know why I keep finding these things to draw my mind back and back and back to that same hurting place. The book has been one instigator among many that have bitten into me this week and don't seem to want to let go. I don't even understand it, and the more I think about why it seems to hurt and explain all at the same time, the more I just feel confused and want to cry.

There's no way to express it. I can't draw how I feel...I tried. I can't write it out, I've tried that over and over. I can't drown it in music, and when I try, it only emphasizes the...pain. The unbreakable heartbreaking. The something. It's nothing in the here and now that hurts. It's...maybe it's my own terror that I'll never have someone to call me their own...but it's more than that. Deeper...somehow. Inexpressible. That I dangle too close to that chance, it wavers in front of me the slightest breath a dangerous thing that would disperse the misty cloud of possibility, and it will be I who break my heart, my chances. I keep having dreams where I'm destroying the things that make me happy...but it's unwilling, it's blindfolded...

I don't understand them. I want to be able to fight for something that for all I know isn't even there, and I feel like I am fighting for it. But it's hard.

Mleh. Chel feels lonely this week. Stupid...things.

I have suddenly exhausted my poetic steam, and the veritable train of inspiration I had barreling in me has hissed its last and come to a standstill. The people got off and wandered away, and I am sitting here trying to pretend it's still going....trying to pretend that there's nothing outside worth looking at. I have to write. I have to. If I can't write, then the boredom dissolves into mists of despair, and I have nothing to cling to. I have no anchor to keep me grounded if I wander away in that cloud. If the cloud wanders me away.

Odd dreams lately. I cannot escape them, I cannot always remember them perfectly, but my waking is filled with some dark, desperate memory from the nights before. I feel haunted by my subconscious and it's rather disconcerting.

It's the baby that threw me off. I keep getting lost in unfamiliar places...or familiar places that are suddenly old, decrepit. I panic, and wish, and often I can't make a noise, or I don't make a noise because I know there's no one there to hear it. I wander dark hallways and half-lit stairwells....searching for something, and after a while I notice that I've been cradling something in my arms. This small boy-child. It clings to me, as I rush faster, and faster through the house, unable to find the thing that I'm searching for. The thing that seems to be screaming my name in the silence, pleading with me to find it. The baby whimpers, and clutches me so tight around the neck that I'm gasping for breath. I fall. Down some dark pit....like a stairwell that's suddenly not a stairwell, and I step, but there's no step, and I fall. I land and make no noise. I land and don't remember that I was falling. I look for the baby, and there's no baby there anymore. A figure steps out of the darkness into the shaft of grey light sifting through the broken floorboards above us. He reaches for my hand...and I take it. Surprised that he wants to help, that he willingly touches me. I feel like I shouldn't be touched...even if I want to be. My hair hangs shroudingly over my eyes, which I have averted. I'm always averting my eyes, stealing glances sideways at his feet. He sweeps my hair out of my face with a warm hand and asks me to come with him into the dark. I refuse, half-heartedly. There's some reason, some pull that is keeping me in the grey light. It's become familiar, and I know it well. Something comforts me in the way it twists, in the way I can see the dust moving in it. Thunder in the distance. Cold creeps in, and a baby cries in the dark. He asks me to come with him again. It's the crucial moment. A second of wavering on the knife-blade of decision and all will come crashing down around me. I want the grey light. I want the baby in the dark. I want him to hold my hand. I feel pulled in so many directions, and I curl up on the floor and cry. He shakes me gently. I tell him to let me go. That I want him to let me go, and he says "He needs you." And I can't tell if it's him who needs me, or the baby who needs me, or both. I cram my fists into my eyesockets and rock back and forth, wanting the darkness to be over. Cold rainwater, murky, hard, pours through the floor above. I'm quickly drowning in a puddle, but I realize that the puddle was there before the rain came. That I've drowned in a tepid collection of my tears. He is gone. The baby is not crying. My loneliness breaks me, and I am full of regret. The grey light is gone. Something eats me in the dark.