Pyscho = the first six letters of psychologist

I feed my goldfish every day, but lately he’s been a bit down on me. Martin, I say to the fish, I know all the talk we’ve had has been about me, but when you turn into a human being, which should be soon, but not too soon, because I don’t want you to go and die on me, we’re going to talk all about you.

Likely, Martin thinks. I’m not going to play along anymore. I won’t wag my tail when you talk anymore. Now you won’t have anybody for company! It’s going to make you better. After all, the only way somebody gets better is by abandoning them the way I’ve been abandoned!

Martin, I say, don’t be that way. You make all these assumptions because I come over here to the fish tank and tell you these dreary stories that you inquire about. If you want to talk about yourself, I would be all ears, but you seem to have forgotten mentioning yourself and have re-routed all memories so that they are all about me. And I’m tired of hearing my life put into your cliche’s. Now please pretend to have some dignity and step out behind the fish tank?
He steps out, in his muddy parka. He’s dripping wet. He talks in tongues. It is no use. I can’t hear him anymore. His poetry talk has gone to far. He is gone. Like J was gone with the science. They think it’s only real when they are so reimbursed in it that they can’t see anything but what they produce. There is also the appreciation of beauty. And he talks in circles, telling me he looks forward to talking to me when I am no longer the “pining” girl, but when I have moved on. By that time it will be too late, and I won’t want to talk to him. See, I seem to treasure unconditional loyalty above all else. It’s sort of a flaw in my character, you might say. Not “when I feel like it” loyalty.

You were wrong, I say. I can live with that. But can’t you stop talking for one minute to realize that the only thing I’ve said in our conversations lately has been to actualize something. But no, no mention of our music project. The seaweed. All tied up in you. I have good days, I have bad days. Sometimes people, especially poets, are good at casting off nets with all of their knots and they catch somebody who thinks, oh yes, they just described my web of problems. But it wasn’t. It was just a net.

He’s wrong, and I’m sick of people being wrong. I just wanted to hang out with somebody. In silence, whatever they want. Looks like he hasn’t realize that I pretty much will acquiesce to anybody who makes an order clear. Except his order. They are all the same, really.. they only want me on their terms.. Martin only wants to talk to me when I stop talking about things he doesn’t like, and other people only want me when I stop doing things they don’t like… for instance, one guy would like it if I dressed differently, another if I never wrote things down, another if I conformed to society, and another likes me the way I am…. but only on Wednesdays.

Letter

Dear E. Downing,

I start asking why and the voices won’t stop. Please, can’t you just do that for me? Give me the answers and let me go. Let me go. Can’t you let me go? I bargain and bargain in my head and it gets so loud in there. I beg God, if I give away a kidney, will he tell me about the contradictions inherent in so many of the things he said? Will he please, please be straight with me? Will he tell me the truth? Or does the truth depend on his mood? Why can’t he just stick with facts. Tell me who he’s slept with while we’ve been broken up, or why his relationship status still says he’s in a relationship. Is it because he thinks we are still together, that we have not concluded our relationship? Is it because he doesn’t want to answer the questions people might ask if he puts single? And why, oh why, did he erase my message on his page when he knows it truly does hurt my feelings? Feelings he once cared about enough to not erase things and to promise he wouldn’t? How I hate reminding people of things they said and then didn’t do, I hate it, once spoken out loud I feel like the traitor for pointing out what was left undone. Like the nag, the hag, the rag. E, it hurt me so much to look at your page and see that you expressively erased a comment I left with pure intent, thinking the article would be of solid interest to you. On an intellectual level if nothing else. But instead you delete it as if to show me you can hurt me. Haven’t we already covered that territory? I want to know how good it feels to know you have the power to hurt me. Have you not felt powerful in a long time? I mean I would think you have too much power. You’re the boss and you are already really bossy. I have so much that is so important that we will never discuss. You have no idea how many conversations we can’t have. They over weigh me in their magnitude. Just the potential. And then, you want to believe I would care if you are fucking some girl right now. The truth is that I welcome it; at least then you will know not just hypothetically but viscerally that you cannot find what you had with me with anybody else. I try to find love and cover myself in it and then I feel like you yank the blanket away from me, why do you do that? You seem to care so little for anybody else. Every time the ball is in your court, and your dramas seem to be way more important than my little life. But other guys I talk to they talk to me like “holy shit your life is bursting with events and twists and subject matter that needs to be tended to.. and yet you are below zero maintenance girl.” You might say that is because they want to sleep with me. But I don’t know what you will say because the happiness is fading. It is fading and I don’t want to let it go, would you want to let it go? I sent you messages this morning because I felt this manic laughter rippling inside me and I wanted to share it with you, and in return I just felt waves and waves of sorrow that had an empty shell around it, as if the sorrow hated itself for existed, as if even the sorrow was supposed to fit inside the size of a mosquito’s needle. Why? Why did the sky fall on us? I thought you knew how to build a proper foundation. I want to know about your past, and you made it sound like my curiosity was something sinister when really it is childlike. I just wanted to know you. You made me feel abnormal for asking normal questions. I don’t have much of a sense of normal, and you took advantage of that. Oh, I’m well aware that I am very fucked up!!! but I was open about it, as open as you were closed. But I compromised.. I kept compromising. More than I knew I could. But you didn’t. When I wanted something, was it so important to keep it from me? What was so important that you had to lie to me everyday? Even the last time we spoke. It’s always the last time we speak. It takes my breath away and I’m back to being five again, during an asthma attack, and there is no oxygen. No matter how I gasp, I can’t get the air in. That is the feeling. That captures it. The big gap of what you won’t disclose to me. So what deep dark closet is so important that it has to be hidden from me? Are you really so self-important that keeping your secrets secret are more important than me or you or your life? I was part of your family. You said I was just a toy for your kids to play with. Even they would have been offended of that description of me, and there is so much shame in that statement. If you said it to hurt me it had no affecton me. I don’t know why. Sometimes I don’t recognize the worst things people say. Because, anyway, it never would have mattered? I still bargain. I say, dear God, if I had only not done this, or not said this, would it have been okay? Would he have not sodomized me like a boy in a juvenile prison? Would he have not clap clapped his whip and said, ah-hah, you came back, because in this damp place I am the only thing you have! Ah-hah! ah-hah! E, I could hurt you so much if I wanted to but can’t you see how much control I am exercising? Yes, I am not flawless, I write these things down after I cry or whatever things you probably thing are sickening, that sickening disgusting sincerity again, do we have to go through it again? I couldn’t hurt you. I know many ways to hurt a person. Maybe more than you. But I can’t. I won’t. I refuse to. Not even you could get me to hurt you. Is that why it’s over?

It would take so little. Is it so much to you?

These promises you make. They remind me of the hustlers who borrow money from me and never pay me back. Did they believe they would pay me back?

Was I anything to a mark to you?

I just want to know, dear lord, I just want to KNOW. Why? Should it matter? it matters to me so yes, it matters.

I would have sacrificed so many things for you and now I find myself in the position of my sacrifices being totally meaningless to you.  Because I wasn’t mean enough. I show my feelings too much. I tell you I miss you and you say you know, as if it is a burden you carry rather than a gift. I am so sorry I gave you myself because it made you feel bad. I’m sorry I can’t return myself to wherever I came from. I am tired emotionally, like somebody with a throat that can’t speak. If I come over tonight, will it all have been a bad dream?

Let it be a bad dream. Let it be a bad dream.

I need to get away from myself. From everything. I need to get away. If I can’t have him, and I can’t live without him, than I don’t want anything at all. I don’t mean that, do I? I know I feel as if he is the only person that can make me feel better. I always thought it was a lie when in books the writer described a physical sensation of pain on his chest. But I can feel pain. I can feel it as if I am drowning in my lungs, as if my heart is deteriorating from lack of will.

O Domina nostra.

the sanctimonious prick (x-rated)

cant remember what it ever felt like to have the sanctimonious prick’s cock in me. oh, he is one of the very few who needs to pretend he must resist me if he is going to want me. anything worth wanting you have to play a bargain game with, well, this kind of game can be emotionally tiresome, especially after a long day when i just need somebody to wrap their arms around me and say, you are okay the way you are, but no, he told me i was supposed to love myself more, why? because i had a history of people like him. or maybe he said it because he knew that after him i would be so wounded that i would need all the love i could take, that i would become so sick i would need to suck off the love from homeless men. i want to say he knew what he was doing when he resisted me and that it was always intentional because oh, if he had to worry about weakening for one second he might lose his power, the only thing he cares about in the world, besides, he likes to think of a world where people think about what they must not do with each other. oh, my long term boyfriend or husband or fiance or ex, i must think about what we shouldn’t do. i would think now that we have broken up you are so angry at me for leaving that you want to believe that it was your resistance that made me leave, that i didn’t know about it. i knew about it and i tried to build on it but you were too simple to learn. to stuck in old habits. if your ex was a nun in bed, what were you? besides, i banished any feeling of what sex was like with you out of my minds-eye first, they were the easiest to forget because the feeling is too familiar to me, that sickening need to gush their seed into any slit at all, but he acted like he was different, and don’t go on thinking i don’t feel unworthy every moment of the day for believing in a prick like him who cant even pick up the phone, who doesn’t have the courage or character to even say hello to me, for in his head i stopped existing the day he pretended to acknowledge my existence, and if only i had known that then, i could have walked on and over him, not by him but over him, because people like that, they don’t go away if you walk by them, after all, how many other young pretty girls did he send friend requests to, and if i believe he was ever sincere in anything he did, if i let myself believe that he was different, which i do, then i won’t get better. for they tell me to move on and forget but i keep screaming, no, it’s not over, and i’m not going to let it be over, all i have to do is reach him, but they remind me that his heart is dead and i’m pumping on and on for days on a corpse, saying no, no, i won’t let his heart be dead. maybe it was dead the whole time and i thought a person was making love, but now it feels like we are simply paying for a clash between our different previous lovers. i’ll move to his grave and look for some sign that he left something for me, i will get machines and tear open the ground looking for a tiny piece of paper with a number, a name, a sign, even a picture. but his daughter cared for me more than he ever did. she left me a picture to remember her by, but this guy didnt even want to get me a holiday gift, a birthday gift, or an anniversary gift. i must accept i was nothing but a dog for him to kick. a dog for him to kick and kick and kick and kick and kick until my gut spilled out and then that part got boring for him, but for some strange reason sadists like to watch their dicks get long and hard, they like to see somebody else as powerless and just a receptacle for their waste and toxins, and the people who want to get rid of their emotional toxins by kicking me are a lot worse than men who just plant their cock in my mouth. so girls want to give them a taste of their own medicine by saying they can play it loose and fast too, they can kick their head back and treat it like a game, going about the search for instant gratification by any means necessary, but it just comes down to remorse and despair, i dont even have the energy to muster up anger at him, i never did, i only wanted to hurt myself for what he did. after he caused so much pain you wonder, what is wrong with you, can’t you fight back? it was never about fighting, i want to say, it was never about a fair fight, either, nor a crooked one, it’s the fact that i was out of my league the first day, and still i loved, i loved so hard and so good, and i took every kick like it was a kiss because i thought maybe it’s the only way he can show anything, just like i seem to notice criticism more than i notice praise, but why now, why this silence, why this cruel, everlasting taunt, it’s in the air, invisible hardening everywhere, and just like the employee he fired i want to plaster papers everywhere saying, this man is not real, this man is not real, he is lying to all of you right now, but im still hoping that he will show up at the last minute and say it was just a test, im sorry you are so exhausted, but the truth is he was never very nice to me anyway, so why cant i find somebody nicer? plenty of guys let me call them any time of the night, even if it is to hear me go on and on about my problems, so why am i wasting time wondering about somebody who never was very nice? because we fit together, that’s why. we fit together, but we are both so fucked up we couldnt even make perfection work. he had to go and ruin it his way and my way, well, i told him from the beginning it was a long shot, i told him all my weaknesses in our first conversation whereas he told me nothing, shouldnt that have told me something? well, i thought his privacy was interesting, and i like puzzles, but this one is ruining my life, taking over my time, i have t0 look over my shoulder all the time now because i think i am still standing on the grave he sent me to, but he didnt even send me there, he sent me to no mans land, a place where children are kidnapped, because he doesnt want me to get my ending, it is the only power he has right now, trying to hold my ending over me, and i cant stop that, he does have a role in the end of our goodbye or in the continuation of us, but he is too lazy to think about it, he doesn’t want to decide, he wants to decide not to decide and one day he can just crawl over and die, and then it will be decided for him. if he never says goodbye or hello, then the fate decides for him. i hate him for this philosophy, i see how it ruins everything he touches and i cry out, and i do things to hurt myself in front of him to show him how it affects people, but it is too late, he hardly cares about a few scrapes and falls and he is too hardened to soften when he sees a boo boo or a drawing or a little girl by her swing set crying. he is hard. he is so hard, maybe he is made of metal, so why do i care? why do i waste my time with a titanium robot? maybe it is easier than facing my own demons? i dont know. I dont know. I just don’t know.im so tired of thinking “how will he react if oh no he sees that i wrote something unflattering about him when he said i wasnt supposed to write down anything about him?” but he broke so many promises you’de think he of all people would understand somebody else breaking a promise but no. and this one is for my sanity. dear sanity, i do not feel sane. please help me. i feel like i need him to feel sane again because my heart is on life support, im willing to give it to somebody else who needs it. put it on a ventilator or something i cant handle it inside me anymore, please, oh please, oh, i will do anything if you give me that. but it doesnt matter how many times i say please, does it. and what is it i want back anyway?

can’t lash out anymore

Subj: crimson‏
From: Ivy (ndiaphonous@hotmail.com)
Sent: Wed 2/06/08 5:46 AM
To: Blade Alexander (soundbox@comvast.net)
Dearest Blade,
Thank you for replying, it surprised me.
I wish I could have simple stances. I do not.
Since I doubt myself, I assume I am wrong most of the time.
Therefore, my friends and colleagues and teachers are wrong too. This is why Starner thinks I am hostile. I doubt assumptions.
In response to you, I do not think about what selections make me happy.
I think about function. And I think there is a crisis in music.

At the U, I cannot tell a teacher I picked a phrase for how I feel about it.
The words ‘feel, like, sound;’ all are forbidden because this is a sterile environment.
Sound waves are to be prodded.
examined and factored, turned into polynomials
If blackboards can kill.

But the proofs some should be able to come up wiht will not fit in the world
even if the music will.
Anyway that is not my job.

Why should it be now?
And like John Cage, I cannot predict which sounds affect me.

Like right now, Can you guess where I am?
Where I have fled?

I am at Cornish.

For the first time in how knows how long? I snuck into the theatre, crouched behind the soft velvet curtains and landed my head on my hoodie pretending to conceal the place my thoughts wanted to go to again

i must give him and others a forgiveness that my own remoteness denies me but by the time i can do that i have lost all claim to dignity

The sound of the music compressed on my IPOD that a homeless junkie sold me for 10 bucks combined with the music coming off the stage that sounded like Janet’s music with more maturity and complexity make me feel things I’ve been feeling. THe anger of the unborn beseeching my skin. Parker was supposed to meet me after two months of being jailed at home on home detention. He doesnt show up. My hands become white knuckes. I turn in I relapse i swallow i swallow. My mind becomes the blank page I hate and I see the glazed look in my eyes I’ve only recently realized all benzo heads have. I was not angry at the girl who sold me glyburide, a diabetic pill. had i took more, had i gone into a coma rather than the seizure, it would be a different story. i am not mad at her;

I am mad at those people who are close to me because of the ambiguity in their identity the perfect mask i missed seeing beneath because of their tenderness that turns to strategies and beautiful evasions and finally, finally, an iron curtain decending on me.

And right now I have only one thing seeping through me and that is all the things that kill my soul which is the music right now, It is the sound of the out of tune violins playing in the practice room and the man singing about black sheep and blood, and the blood must be on my hands it must be there is no other way around it and that is the music I want to write and I do my best but it’s not enough the fucking teacher says it is too raw and repetetive, and I hate myself for listening to their opinions, because you know I do, you know I cant help but take every opinion seriously as if it came from some person that just came back to life.

I am writing an email that if I read later I will be astonished for writing. I look back on all emails I write you and other people and cannot believe the things I said. I judgmentally scrutinize every word later and cannot believe the pure recklessness and disgusting anxiousness that was there when I was writing. I couldn’t stop no I couldn’t. I had to send it now and the or never. And I couldn’t write a second drafts. The times when I write people letters carefully I put them in drafts folders and never send them. I have tons for everybody I know, tons of unsent letters. Wasted time you must be thinking.

regarding what you say?
what you say is right except every time I look at my music I see it differently.
Like a kaleidescope?
Let’s pretend that when i write music happiness were my aim.
So just because I am happy with my music one day does not mean I will be the next day. This is the fallacy.. Trying to make myself happy on all days might be an aim.. But that might include destroying yesterday for the sake of today until all that ever existed was one day’s work.. today’s work, as usual. I am not that hateful about old works, and I do live in a world where the distance between today and yesterday is more connected, but for the sake of a pole to strap my concerns on I randomly chose two opposing sets of “what is at stake” in the same argument. But you see there is also the problem of wanting responsibility one day, happiness another day, judgment another day, illumination another day, maturity another day, and simple virtuosity another day.

Mostly I think about the condemned and the doomed because they know!

They know where their fates are.

Maybe they are free to create because they have no curiosity left.

I don’t know what I am saying. I only know the force behind it.

I haven’t been able to make money without seeing Parker. Without his sweet comfort. For some strange reason I haven’t done escorting for weeks now. I have to get back to it. I don’t know what job I will find. I know I am the worst person that exists at self-promotion there is.

I apologize if this email sounds like a string of apologies into your lap. Most of all I am so sorry for you gave me so much hope in myself. I am so sorry to let you know that I… I do not have much confidence. All I have left is tenderness, and it has no direction. And tenderness is never the same as love. It is a compensation. And when it has no direction, I ache all over. I am on 170 mg of methadone, Blade. It does nothing. I often take up to 500 mg a day. It does nothing. I will come off some day. But in the meantime, the pain killers do not kill pain, they only put up a haze and make me think that my immunity is higher than it is.

I thought that life could have no sting
To infant butterflies,
So I gazed on this unhappy thing
With wonder and surprise.
“I do not want to fly”
I want to be a worm

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my phone message

It made a positive difference, if only for a day.

Blade. is there any way I can still have my opera performed in Blue Haven Hall? The administrator never responded the way she said she would. I never persisted the way I should have. I guess I will write her again and try and be more forceful. But I would rather evade everyone and everything.

You understand that feeling. I know you do.

Ivy

Stigmata

“I was the one who couldn’t be left,” I cried out to a stranger on the street. I tripped on the edge of something sharp. I didn’t look down to see what it was. The pain in my leg was now stinging, strangling my breathing, but my expression didn’t betray the pain.

I entered Therapeutic Health Services and retrieved my pink cup of sweet nectar.

There is something urinary about the drink. The first time I tried it, I threw it up. It tasted like penicillin, which I was allergic to as a kid. But now it is almost too sweet to be real. How something could change over time is magical, just like the word addiction once sounded alluring to my teenager friends.

Took me a long time to go from wanting to needing. I wanted opiates for the search for an emotional blanket that was a heaven of comfort. But now I just need methadone to feel what psychologists call “normal.” I don’t understand. My moods change with the wind. Now I have something synthetic regulating how I see and feel?

Parker has just left me. He left as if I was an armed gun he had to dodge. How he sees the world has always been severed. Still, he bonded with a me. A man who has never been romantic with anybody, who jumped off a bridge when they turned 19, then spent the next 13 years of their life reading books, playing chess. Before 19, he was a chess master. Now, he is considered nothing to anybody. Except me.

Through me he was seeing things for the first time. Because of his isolation, his need for taste was stronger. But more than that, his ability to taste was incredible, like an artists. He would carve letters into my back with the gentleness of a feather for three hours nonstop. Now that will never be.

He had never touched anybody romantically before. His touch was of a virgin and he had never touched or kissed anybody before me. I don’t think he will touch anybody after me, either.

And, nobody will ever touch me that gently again, either, for he touched me with the potency of my first taste of vicodin.

I wait for group.

For once, flashes before my eyes startle me, their patchwork or pathway so intricately fatal that it registers that there was not only a fall into this grave place where I became a victim again, but also a catalyst I could not capture in words.

I can’t breathe but I stair out into space. Tears stream down my face but I stare at the door to the room where we meet, vacant. I’m not positive the tears are real until people circle me, asking me things. I can’t answer them. I feel like I am in a fish tank, looking out.

A counselor yanks a cup of coffee out of my hands as I sit in a corner shaking, unable to breathe, having difficulty from not breaking out of my body altogether. “Crybaby!” She batted at me. “You sit in a chair or you will be OFF!” Off the clinic, I suppose.

Seven other clinic patients watched her badger me as I fell apart, moments after Parker drove his car from my life for the last time. Minutes after people had told me that I was being hunted for actions I had not committed and would be killed for a lie somebody invented. My mistake was trying to follow their logic. My mistake was, as I repeated over and over again, even as a merciful God did nothing to try to draw me out of my loop- God let me keep my own faith in that road to nowhere, for I believed that one day the same thing would yield me different results. But they call this insanity, and I am not insane. The thing that keeps it different are the people, and my eyes, which are always changing.

I was always thinking that I would lose something if I was not their friend anymore, no matter who they were. Even if they were unsustainable, despicable, and repugnant.

I was waiting for group. I can’t sit in a chair, I could not explain to her. I cannot talk, I could not explain. I was nothing more than a trapped animal, but a bitch like her could not see that. She was a prosecutor, trying to make me look like I had designed this circus.

I don’t know who I called on the phone, but I remember calling out, over and over again, “it hurts, right here, this spot where my heart is, it hurts right here, where my actual heart is.” And writing these words down right now mean it hurts again and I have to stop writing soon.

My counselor wants me to write down my role in relationships. She also needs me to write a report about the counselor who was abusive, since seven other people wrote reports and theirs won’t count unless I write one too. I keep waiting. I am so hesitant to write anything. I entered a silence since the whole event.

Every day my mind thought about other things in a promise to ward Parker’s gaze off of mine. The one I never decided on. His eyes never seemed evil- they never seemed sad- they never seemed sad- but then again, would anybody that obsessed with mercy killings betray themselves when caught in a stare?

Every time I came to him with pain, he did something to kill me so I would not suffer. He became my anti-God. God would have told me it would hurt for a little while but that it was a gift, like stigmata. But my ears weren’t open… except to others pain which I absorbed neatly, thoroughly, but mostly casually, as if it were nothing more than a board game.

For once, flashes before my eyes startled me, their patchwork or pathway so intricately fatal that it registered that there was not only a fall into this grave place where I became a victim again, but also a catalyst I could not capture in words.

And now I just see peoples backs. As I try to pray. As I try to hope. As I try to understand how things ended so wrong when I loved so right. James writes me an email that is assisted suicide. He has become like the school he attends. He has so eagerly forgotten his past and now stands severely above me. It is laughable. He says he knows me for bits of information I have scattered like birdseed. But he has seen nothing. He does not believe in miracles. He does not believe in the strength of his own recovery, so why would he mine? He is probably so weak inside, he doesn’t understand why my adventure into the gutter has to go so deep. Because I do everything deeply, even purification.

The only miracle in my life now is that no matter who is in my bed, I see no flaws in them. I sleep with them like they are the only love I have known. No matter if their kisses are pecks like a birds, their tongue like a lizards that has no direction. I do not study my place in their life, nor theirs in mine. I only send out rays of light to them and then return to my chaotic whirlwind. I return to checking the voltages; seeing when the next house will fall and the next bolt of lightening will crash. When will the next fire burn and where? Where should I place the extinguisher, just in case? My life is a series of skipping from coos of love to staring ravaged patients in the face. I hope I do not flinch when I look pain in the face so many times. It is true, I have slowly lost my laugh and my smile, but I know these are small things that can return with the right friends.

I have given up the role Parker played in my life.

He was the master surgeon, attending to my wounds with the love of a mother for weeks.

But then, in a moment he would turn. His face contorted. And he became a dog with rabies who would not only undo his weeks of patient stitches and calm insertions of tubes and treatments and salves and begin ripping me open so that I was worse off than before he had cured ten year old wounds. But how I held to that hope. If he cured the ten year old wounds, couldn’t he do it again, and not turn into the dog of destruction? He could not.

I scribble on soiled toilet paper.

My Dearest Parker, I cannot write anymore. It has become hard to write, and for the first time since I saw you and you drove off, my heart aches in my chest physically. I feel like I will die from the pain inside. I think about transplants. If I die, and my heart is intact, will the person who gets it suddenly listen to a certain prelude and fugue of Bach’s on nonstop for weeks and only read holocaust poetry, listening to Jodi Picoult on tape and doing nothing else but absorbing the worlds suffering because nobody else is paying attention? Or because they don’t know why? Will they suddenly start crying for reasons they don’t understand, when previous to the transplant, they had never cried in their life? Fuck you Parker. Goodbye, Parker. Don’t touch my fucking ashes.

to whom it may concern: at this point in time, words all fail me. all words fail me? a few simple definitions, and i cant feel the geography.

what is a comfort level?

Words dance around and make me feel so sad. When I write this passage, I feel so much heavier than then when I began. consumed

out of my mind

I…cannot…write

anymore

did not think

i could even write this
entry
…..

how to say
goodbye

how to say

goodbye

…….when i believe there can be no goodbyes

oh my God, my darling, why, raw, tear, you, arms,

thank you for the short moments of reprief

but if i become an escapist in this life…….

wont there be damage to pay

and i know it already

the moments i slip into reality are payment already

oh God please speak to me

please come to me

I am not worthy please show me why I was such a pure child and am not

so

now

I need a priest, not a journal

The knife is in

The knife is in; does he have to twist it, too?

Magda and I are getting nowhere as usual. All my friends think Downey is something I should take out to the dumpster. I try to stress the complexities, and while I talk, I look for answers.

“You. Hampster. Wheel,” Magda says tauntingly.

“Please stop,” I order, with a bit of desperation in my tone. She reminds me of something interesting after I read her something I wrote seven years ago. In between our talk, I was searching online for a letter that a boy named Joe wrote me when I was sixteen. Magda had heard a lot about Joe, my first love, but it wasn’t about that. I wanted to see if she agreed with me on his ability to use words like a prodigy, not an 18 year old boy.

I wanted to show her how beautiful his lines were; how they had shaken my world of poetry upside down. His prodigious sense of grammar as well as how finessed his artistic aesthetic was, but all I found when I googled “Joe” in my email files were random emails mentioning the name Joe. Apparently Joe’s emails, along with all important writing done before the age of 19 had indeed gotten trashed when my mother threw my old computer into the bin outside without asking me first.

I did find an email I had written to Burdough though. Jack Burdough, my teacher, and one of my best friends, who I’d just happened to have slept with. Numerous but random times over a seven year period. In fact, I used to attribute my drug use to him. For if it weren’t for him breaking my heart, I would never have behaved self-destructively. Using elementary logic, that was true, but I stopped saying things like that because people mistook it for me using excuses. Then they’d start to argue with me. I just don’t like arguments. They upset me. Plus, it wasn’t Burdough’s fault- not anymore, anyway. I used to judge things simply and fairly. Now I no longer believed I could discover what was fair without significant luck, research, and outside intell. Also, I no longer even tried to do what used to come automatically to me- assess what somebody else’s personal responsibility was in any given situation.

“Can you believe I wrote this email?” I asked Magda, truly stunned at what I’d read aloud. “I mean, Magda, what kind of person uses these phrases! If all I had to read was this, I would have immediately assumed the person was crazy!”

“Well…” Magda stumbles, “there was a time when you would get really excited about something, and you would order people around. You would become a bit manic and demand outrageous things of people. It hurt some people’s feelings. I think it’s good that you aren’t such a megalomaniac now.”

“Another trait I lost,” I say as much to her as to myself.

“Before, you probably would have done to him what you did to Raptis.” She changed her voice quality to one of free-spiritedness. “You are pathetic, you have proved nothing, and you are not worth my fucking time you creep! Oh, and have a nice day, like you always say at the end of your emails. Do you know how fake that comes across? One day everybody at Jeff’s party kept making fun of that… Bye!” I believed her impersonation of me, but it still shocked.

“I never said anything like that to him! I simply chose not to be in a relationship with him! I felt bad, and I sometimes regretted my choice, but I never spoke like that to him. Or…. did I?”

“Well, no, not like that. But it was in self-protection or because somebody was an asshole- you used whatever weapons were in your arsenal. It was your masculine side.”

I sigh, feeling doomed.

“Now I don’t use weapons at all. But this email? I actually use the word jet setting? Oh no, I use it twice!” I laugh. “Well, first I told him to guess. He’d asked what was up! The first two possibilities were cleverly written actually. I told him about how the information was classified; and then I described a scenario where I’ve been captured by a white-slavery operation, chained inside the closet of an old black man named Lysol. I told Burdough that infrequently, I crawled out to his computer to send messages. Listen to this part Magda… I actually wrote this kind of shit to him all that time, I can’t believe this. I wrote, ‘Since your sweet lack of love for me was the closest thing to affection that I ever experienced, please rescue me from this drudgery. I believe I am being held somewhere in Tacoma. At least a place that smells like Tacoma.’

“Yes, I remember that email.. I helped you write the first paragraph about how quote the obviously communist source of your information is not a trusted or bonded client, and that any information received by you from such sources cannot be confirmed or denied by this office. Please forward future messages of this nature through confidential if not classified highly-trusted conduits.”

“I love that you remember Magda!! So next is the part I can’t believe that I wrote.. I just cannot believe I ever could have been a person that wrote something like this. I told Burdough I was too busy with my jet setter lifestyle- (I was in the middle of reading a rich girl book from the sixties about sexual freedom, a famous book by the way, I can’t remember the author right now but remind me about it later okay) and that I was too busy hustling to deal with him and through my illicit “job” I’d met this contractor named Jeff. I then proceeded to tell Burdough every detail about Jeff, including how after he paid to sleep with me I called him and, in a quote unquote fifteen year old sounding voice, that I thought he was different from the others and I wanted to see him in a nonprofessional way maybe. And then, I wrote about how Jeff didn’t respond for two weeks, then suddenly sent me seven texts that we needed to see each other! But then, my phone wasn’t working so I hadn’t received the texts, so I was waiting to hear when Jeff would get a hold of me again.”

“I have to go soon baby…”

“Wait, wait! I haven’t gotten to the best part! So I finish off the ‘third possibility’ in the email to Burdough by practically yelling at him that he must be assuming I’m a dumbfuck for thinking this guy could fall in love with me but that he is wrong, wrong, wrong, and that- listen to this Magda- Burdough, I just don’t like guys very often. There are normal guys out there that want to date me but for some reason there always has to be an element of dangerous intrigue. And they can’t be wimpy and cry on me when I tell them I don’t like sentimentality.”

I am the one crying and being wimpy now, refusing to pull the trigger. Trigger was the nickname Downey gave me. But he never used it the way he could have. I’ve never seen so much potential wasted until I entered a relationship that doesn’t meet the qualifications of a relationship anymore unless, and only unless, communication is the enemy of all relationships.

“Magda! This is insane! I’ve been stripped of all my confidence!”

“Well, what you had would only be good for politicians… and you’re not a politician. So what did Burdough write back to that one?”

“Burdough wrote back that he was not making a judgment, he was simply seeking clarification. How funny. Let’s see.. this was in 2007. I’ve forgotten how many emails have been exchanged over the years. I can’t believe how many things he has seen from me. No wonder he might be suddenly worried about me right now… These days I have lost all my bravado. But back to Downey, how could he not care when he wants to stay in the relationship? It makes no sense. None.”

“Well, he was drunk.”

“Downey was not drunk! He doesn’t drink! Oh.. wait. You mean he was intoxicated on the moment? After three years of celibacy? On lust? Or something? That makes no sense. He acts like he doesn’t like sex.. It’s complicated, and thinking about him and his silent sexuality gives me a headache. It makes no sense.”

“I’m saying it’s purely physical for him.”

“Nooo! It’s the opposite if anything. Maybe I need to trust Downey on this one… I want to be more physical with Downey so badly… but maybe it’s because I think being physical will solve things that we don’t talk about? I don’t know. But he won’t talk to me. I can’t get us to talk. He’ll just roll his eyes and turn the channel on his TV. Which is always on when I come over. And now we don’t talk on the phone. So I only see him if I randomly show up. And then I am in his territory. It’s all so terribly unbalanced, as if he is making it so we never had a chance anyway. And then, the worst part of me wonders, is he just prolonging this so that his wife won’t be able to say she was right, that this wouldn’t last?”

“Maybe he’s trying for a record. He’s going to be the worst boyfriend ever.”

“I just wish things were getting better, not worse. Just when I think they can’t get worse, they do. So there is this war in my head. Break up, don’t break up. I shouldn’t care- I mean, I don’t mind freedom- but the freedom is on his terms. When I was single for six months and I didn’t sleep with anybody, it was my choice. Now it’s his choice…but I have no compensation. No I love you. No I care about you. He doesn’t ask me to come over anymore. He doesn’t call me anymore. I didn’t know we could backtrack so far that we are way beyond where we started. We would have to drive over state borders just to get to where we started. The blank slate.”

“You. Hampster. Wheel. Who can show they care less? Who can show they care less?”

“Stop it Magda, that is physically painful for me to hear. Also, I already played the who can care less game with Burdough! The thing is Downey showed me reciprocation for the first time. Then he took it away. He took it away! How could he be so power hungry that he needed to do that? Did he just stop caring? If so, why didn’t he just tell me? Tell me he doesn’t like me anymore! Please please please!”

I lie on my bed in frustration, making a loud thump noise. Then I notice that my cat is over on the sofa sleeping. She is so involved in dreaming that my thump did not wake her up. She is making whimpering noises. She must be having a bad dream. I lean over and softly stroke her.

“How can I go to the stupid game now? You know that before Downey, I was willing to drown in my own urine just to feel reciprocation from Burdough. But it was too late and I had accepted that, but we had moved on. I learned that he cared but that situations were complex and that maybe he showed reciprocation the only way he could. But Downey? Now he is showing less reciprocation than a married man did with his mistress!”

“He beats his dog,” Magda said in that taunting voice.

“He DOES NOT BEAT HIS DOG FOR CHRISSAKE! He is disciplining his dog. And I know with all my heart that his intentions are good. What do you know about dogs? You don’t own one. Shut up! And also you know that sometimes the best of intentions end up causing bad, and that bad things sometimes accidentally cause good things. I’m not trying to ruin cause and affect here, but…. Magda, do you think I have learned to justify everything, that I’ve lost all sense of simplicity? You know what’s funny? Downey told me I needed a compass.. I got lost on his street trying to catch the bus.. I mean, I’m a city girl, and those streets were crazy turnaround style, and he was mean on the phone and to me and it made me want to cry, because I felt like he was threatening to leave without me, which in a sense he was if I didn’t make it back in time! So he told me to turn around and I did, then walking 10 minutes in the opposite direction, and then finding a kindly old man who gave me directions, while Downey finally looked up my instructions on his computer, and I went back the way I had come. The irony was I was two houses away from him when I called, but the addresses were such that the street I gave him on the phone he did not recognize. When I came back, my only frustration was that I had not caught my original bus- I would have missed it in any case because I woke up at 7:11 instead of 7 am. But it was because I put his alarm on some water bird chime instead of the annoying BEEP! BEEP! But the road system? Such is the place he lives. Anyway, he said I had ten minutes before he had to leave, but when I got back, he was not ready to go, and it was more like forty-five minutes. I didn’t have to go through all that stress of being lost and thinking he would leave me behind even though I was only a block away!! I guess it shows.. I dunno.”

“What a nice man. Such a fine gentleman he is.”

“Stop it,” I plead with her, the urgency in my tone crystal-clear.

“Magda, what’s funny is the compass comment. It’s like you could put me in a place where it’s impossible to get lost and I’d get lost. I think I need a compass in more than one way. Magda, what makes me sad is I want to talk to Downey more. We never talk anymore. And I can’t point this out. I can’t say anything that even suggests that I have human needs that could compete with his. Months ago we decided that at least, we’d talk once a week and see each other week. But then he broke that promise too. I can’t think of a single promise he has not broken anymore.. except for when he showed up to have dinner. That was so nice. But then he wouldn’t stay the extra hour… and he would have before. In the beginning. I know he would have. I’ll compromise no sleep to see him. I’ll compromise pretty much anything, even my best client. He doesn’t know that and it’s my choice. But he won’t compromise anything. Magda, why aren’t you telling me to just break up with him? You aren’t saying that.”

“Well, you seem to feel pretty strongly about him, even if he is a sadist. But I do suggest you come up with a petty nickname for him. How about buster the mean nine-year old boy who likes to pull girls ponytails and has a frog in his pocket and he poops in his pants and likes it? And he has one missing front tooth.”

“Uh, that’s a bit long for a nickname.”

“Buster. So fat he has to wear his dad’s bathing suit. But why he is so mean? Why is he a mean nasty little boy? Why is he mean? Why is Buster so mean? Why does he capture bugs and burn them under magnifying glasses and pull their feet off? Why? Because he is mean. I don’t know if Buster is the right nickname for such a nasty little boy.”

“Wow. That is awful. You really think he is that bad?”

“No,” Magda says, managing to sound innocent.

“Everything is an exaggeration,” Magda explains. “Think about Irwin. He needs exaggeration almost as much as he needs food. Thank God Buster is only a figment of our imagination, for if he existed he would grow up, and he might have kids, and there he would be, Mr. Buster. I’m sure he would be republican. And a grown up Buster could never exist of course. I don’t know anybody like that, do you?”

“Is there actually a cartoon character you are basing this on or something?”

“No, but a lot of cruel, spoiled, greedy, mean little boys exist around the world, and I’ve met a few of them. Maybe there is a Buster gene.”

“But I’ve seen Downey be really, REALLY compassionate, too. When he wants he is so empathetic…it’s all I can do not to reach out. But that’s all I do anymore. Reach out. To nothingness. To his back.”

“Well, then maybe it’s not fair to call him Buster. Or maybe the Buster level in his bloodstream is not very high. Or maybe it is. It probably isn’t. He is a wonderful man. You’ve seen him be compassionate! That settles it.”

I cover my forehead with my hand. A silent gesture of sublimation.

“Buster,” Magda whispers. “He is the boy who unplugs his mothers freezer so that everything rots.”

I feel a chill go down my spine.

“Anyway Magda, give the Buster crap a rest, OKAY? Downey said things would get better once he moved. It hasn’t. He breaks anything he says. Last week, he said he would call me. I answered, ‘You said that last week.’ Then he said “I know,” and I left. Well, it’s been a week. I tried to call to set up getting together but he didn’t pick up. I can’t keep doing this. And I can’t keep wondering what I’m going to do. Before, during the holidays, he said he would come back to Seattle. He also said he’d get me my birthday present. Why do I wait? But I can’t explain it. With Downey, he makes me laugh.. and-”

“I thought you said Cutright or could make you as happy as Downey in terms of comic relief. But maybe you said that before Downey.”

“I don’t know that- I’m an experiential learner more than anything else. Sometimes I feel like Downey has traits I used to have- the arrogance, the having things his own way… I used to do that. But there is just so much richness… so many memories; so much we’ve shared. It makes whatever the next move is feel fused with so much meaning, even if it doesn’t have any. Maybe…maybe Downey is teaching me how order creates meaning,” I say brightly.

“Whatever you want to believe, dear. I have do go now, my mom needs to talk to me about something.”

“You have to go?” I say, already lost in my next thought about what I should do. “I was hoping we’d reach a progression…an answer. Oh, well, okay.”

“Talk to you later. Bye.”

the room without doors

I walked into the spacious suite and breathed the scent of silk sheets and hot coffee on brew. I meant to put on a cute brown see-through piece of lingeré, but I didn’t have time. I was kind of tired, but I was really nervous. Not sure if I wanted to be there. Not sure if I could give what he wanted, ironically enough. I gulped down ten number 2 clonipins. They didn’t do a thing to my multiplying heart rate. Before I could put on make-up or change, a knock on the door. I hid behind the door as it swung open, until I briskly stepped aside at the last moment to avoid being crushed.

He entered furtively enough, gently setting his coat garments down on a nearby chair. I gulped air like a girl who’d been holding her breath under water for minutes, the need for intake enormous. The palpable feeling that I was going to get water in my lungs if I let myself inhale. I didn’t know how deep under his ocean of magnetism I was. Before I went under, I remember thinking I’m off guard, he caught me unprepared. Then the last squeeze of rational consciousness faded. All the possibilities I didn’t have time to juggle feeling or thinking anymore flickered and danced. He was here now. I could scrape my nails against his skin as hard as I wanted, or trace his face as lightly and delicately as possible. I’d ruffle his hair and kiss him for as long as I wanted. He wouldn’t stop me. I loved that he wouldn’t stop me…anything was possible.

A wall was behind me, how far I didn’t stop to guess, I just continued my walking backwards, my naked shoulders pointing to the wall as I continued darting back and forth on reckless footing. His steps were not labored or reckless. They were surprisingly graceful and agile. As he advanced swiftly, I tried not to notice what he was doing, how he was approaching. I eyed the floor, the door, and the bed wildly, using my heightened state of mind to take in every detail in the room except for him.

Then there wasn’t any room left for me to backtrack and he pushed himself against me and I wanted him in me then and there. I was gutter punched on a road without any air left to intake. The only thing that took my consciousness next was the sensation of desire- no, no, is that the word? Not that there wasn’t desire. Merely that it was some kind of understanding, or a language that didn’t need words to affirm their meaning. His hands, emboldened by a drowning sensation so strong on my part I was ashamed. I was so reckless, even when I wasn’t squirming. A lingering kiss on the lips made my legs quaver slightly. He took control; he’d known I’d wanted him to even if I hadn’t. He stilled me and I moved no more except for my mouth and tongue. I was finally as still inside as a gazelle alert for a hunter when he kissed me.

He traced my skin gently. He didn’t need to ask if I needed to be touched. Some people have one off hand, one on hand. I was used to somebody who didn’t really use their hands. But both of his hands were on hands. His fingers were a hummingbird below me as I gazed over a cliff. His fingers were nimble, his tongue probing. I didn’t need the clonipin. I wanted him in, I so wanted him, but I didn’t even need the sex. I just needed to remember what human kindness felt like. It’s ironic that some of the things he did to make me feel good might just surprise you. But I knew they were relegated to this domain alone. If I wanted him to hold be in a fetal position while I cried my heart out, he would have obliged. Maybe out of obligation; maybe just because he knew the suffering was beyond reach now. Only his song could softly draw me out of it. I whinnied in acquiescence, in a mixture of pain and pleasure and undiluted recognition. His eyes were on mine. Subconsciously, and over a long period of time, I had been trained to avert my gaze, but it didn’t used to be that way. He slowly got me to fleetingly look up, then gaze, and maybe look. At least I was okay with him looking. That was no longer hard for me. I trusted his gaze like no other. I was his in this way alone. Afterwards his heart rate was fluttering while mine barely registered. The whole thing was only painful in that it was not hunger it was need. I needed it but I was a person that ignored my needs but we did not ignore each others needs. We chose other people who filled our appetites but not our needs.

No word for No, ever…

I looked around the place where he no longer lived. It was strange to see the things he had touched. Why was it so hard to remember his smell? Memories did not come when I chose them to come to me. They came randomly or listlessly. I often thought that I had brought them to me, that there was a kind of sense being played out. I tried to make sense of what could not make sense. There were messages where he said he hoped his mindset was not destroying our relationship. Was his self-awareness extended enough to later remember saying that? I’d never known somebody so intimately. Simultaneously I yet felt so lost. Every time I used to dial his digits, I didn’t know what kind of mood calling him would inspire. Before he got on the phone, I could be in one of a hundred of different moods. And there were so many shades of beauty he missed out on when he didn’t answer. Sometimes it seemed like he answered only when I was not in the right mood to talk. But I persisted to call even when the mood was bad, if only to connect. And still, I didn’t know what disconnection meant. All those things I did not know but could see and hear and feel pounded on my door and chased at my nights. It held me captive, the thing I could not know. The space that we did not share was where I kept trying to break in. I wasted time trying to pound that place open. I think he saw me there and pretended not to. I think he saw me and it’s what made him want me to go away. But he wanted me to stay, too.

Occasionally my heart would leap out of my throat as the phone kept ringing. This especially happened when I sent him emails I could not retract. My words were like bullets meeting their target, but I never thought I was a good marksman, and I always assumed I had not been heard, because nobody heard me in my youth. I thought I was wildly scattering fire because I needed an outlet, because he wouldn’t let me communicate in words anymore, and when I couldn’t communicate in words I tried touch, but he had long ago banished communication from entering any realm we inhabited. I loved him so much I could not breathe and I hated myself for a weakness that he seemed to hate. I let words be more decisive than I was but I did not know what words were doing. I could not see things the way he did. If he had changed, how much had I changed? I later was able to see things in a logical way, but unfortunately, I wanted to share that with him too. Was there ever going to be a time when I didn’t want to share things with him? All of my friends kept saying he didn’t give a shit about me, that he was not right, and they pointed at my checkered judgment to prove it. Their words either pushed me closer towards him or farther away. But I never knew where he was. The longing to know possessed me. It became more important than finding my way. The uncertainty came in waves. One week I was both irritated with myself for stirring up trouble and speaking what I thought was pure logic, but I was most irritated with him for not responding and causing more uncertainty, which in turn caused me to try to ignore what was going on too. I felt free, as if the bullets had freed me in some way. And yet there was only silence on his end. I tried to imagine a life without all the pain he’d caused, but that also meant a life without the pleasure. I cursed him in my mind for the parts of himself he hid from me over and over again, especially since it was getting worse. Or so it seemed. I tried trusting his judgment, but it cast me astray because I could not know the full picture. I tried trusting my judgment, but it was full of holes. I tried trusting the piercing howl of anguish that came over me like a shod of electric shocks. The shocks did not dissipate. And then they quietly left for a while, and I peeked around uneasily. Again, had I trusted my friends more than me?

I looked in the mirror and held my gaze firmly. I was attractive. He didn’t tell me that much. Was that something I liked about him? All those things I attacked, they’d also drawn me to him and now I was blaming then forgiving him for qualities that he had always had but that I kept discovering anew. One time he said I was blaming myself, but when the tears came I was restless that he couldn’t turn over and face me, wipe the tears off my face, kiss me and assure me. I thought that was all I needed but what did I know about need, after all was said and done? I needed so much for that one gesture to be in there somewhere but I felt like an unwanted occupant taking up space next to him, neither mattering nor not mattering. Why didn’t he wake up in the night and randomly whisper things to me? Why was he so effusive, so cold, so habitual in all of his tendencies? Was this a particular tactic to get me to leave or to stay? I could not accept that he could not take on my love except in his own form. I had to see it in my own way. And my own way was so stripped and naked he seemed secretly at a loss. I was at a loss, too. I didn’t know what I could stand to lose. It was strange to believe somebody when they only spoke their thoughts once, then never repeated them. The most important things were unswayable and I latched on to what could not be said like a tiger and her prey. I knew my capacity to love was too large. I had to hide it. It was too much. I was too much. But he was confusing me again. I didn’t belong anywhere.

Maybe he wasn’t really dead. Maybe he had created this house for me as a place to think he had left. But no that was just hope talking. Did I hope I could forget? I think I was scared that I hoped that I would never have to stop breathing in his fumes, his embrace. But I also wanted to be unfettered. I would never trade freedom for security. Except in small items, one by one, the hook sunk into me as into a fish. I could not rely on any one belief, nor could I rely on what the whole picture said. No wonder I was so filled with yearning for him to take me to some cold place and quietly disembark my contradictions with the soft taste of spring water. So he could fill my thirst with something that was cleansing. I did not expect to feel my face burn in a flash of indignation, nor for my hope to give way to a shy but fierce awkwardness. And if it did he had to be there to make it better, and when he wasn’t, I wondered if I didn’t know who he was, and this thought despaired me the most of all. I had to assume everything was a lie if I was to try to follow the trail backwards, to know how far I had come and from where.

Good or bad. Had he been good or bad for me? Why was the house vacant? If he came home he might find me here, still standing and waiting for him to appear. Or he might find me tapping on the table, impatient and ready to coil with a wave of questions. Or still, I might be calm and still, simply wanting that lucidity I felt I deserved. I’d thrown too much and now could not wait. I was walking around in my own cage and feeling deserted all the time if only for my own issues with abandonment. But there was more to it than that, and it was what incensed me to not give up. I wanted to start from a blank slate, I had said, without realizing I was eroding the latest of floors that he had started working on. I kept breaking things and he kept trying to protect me until I was floored to discover that my hammer had a safety valve on it that I couldn’t undo. I used the safety valve as a hammer instead. All the while, my own sense of isolation drummed at me like a pulse. I knew I could live without him, but when he was there I felt like I could not live without him at all. I didn’t understand how things could be so different when he was there and when he was not. Was he the only one making an impact on things? It seemed nothing I did impacted him after a while. Which was why the house looked unaffected by my presence.

Damnit, I had desensitized him. With my words, I had made my moods too indistinguishable so that he was so used to a flourish of ten pages that it made no difference to him when I tried other tactics. I had already poured so many paint colors in there it made no difference when I used white-out. I feared nothing would make the difference. I would have called an “Inaction Hotline” to see if that would fix things but there wasn’t any Inaction Hotline for me to go to and I could not refrain from acting. Whether it was calling or forgetting or thinking or trying not to think, I had no finality. Even in asking for it, did I really expect to get it? I gave up on my ability to use words further. I was sending him two messages. I love you and I hate you or I don’t know, do you know, and I had sent it too many times. And we were tired, so tired. I was tired of doubt, and he, no doubt, was sick of reassurance. He had no more to offer me because in one click, I erased my own message but not the internet footprint it left behind.

I was furious when I found out that the messenger service was so flawed. Why couldn’t my love be greater than my hate? I suppose it was, but when the stain of blood entered the picture, the sense of timeline was lost. What did I know about endings anyway? There I was saying he was ending things all the while asking for a beginning or a new one anyway. The first one was good enough, but I wanted a repeat I guess. Please, I’d just wanted to make things better, that’s why this all started in the first place! I wanted it to be getting better and I was a self-improvement kit I felt he never used. He must have felt like everything he said went on deaf ears after the contradictions were sent out like nuclear warning strikes.

My heart felt like it was locked up inside, and my thoughts felt like they were crying against my skull to get out. I felt like if he could only hear me he would understand, he would understand. I had to believe that. Don’t you see why I had no choice but to believe that?