Can you help me with this heart
Inside my chest?
It ain't perfect
But you should see me use it.

It only works when I make a mess
When it looks like
I'm about to lose it.

I don't have much to say today. Katrina's gone to San Francisco... and I'm lonely.

We all felt lonely and isolated in high school. The institution is constructed to produce that sensation. But I got out of high school and I realized that life didn't continue after that so much as begin, and although I didn't forget how miserable it could be, I haven't felt that way in most of the years since. That directionless ache for company and comfort that company and comfort don't satisfy... it's been a few years at least since I've felt it.

I know this will shock everyone, but I don't feel like analyzing this either... I just want to lie in someone's lap and cry, and have my hair petted and my shoulder rubbed.

Labels: Katrina, Missing You

Fools rush in, so here I am
Awfully glad to be unhappy
I can't win, but here I am
More than glad to be unhappy.

Rain in the desert is just a trifle apocalyptic. Perhaps that's a personal hallucination of some kind provoked by the unusual atmospheric moisture or disturbing lack of crushing, soul-sucking heat, but there you go. Might have something to do with the clouds in Tucson, too. They get kind of menacing and world-ending when monsoon season starts.

I don't think I'm the only child of my generation to be obsessed with searching for magic in the world. In fact, if my conversations with my contemporaries are any indication, I think this may be the defining quality of our generation. I find myself looking always at the corners of things, peeking under leaves for fairies, idly arranging gravel in neat circles and sigils in the hope that light will leap up and, blazing, transport us to a world where the mystery and shine we try so hard to see isn't so damned elusive.

There was a time when I was able to convey that. Not even convey: to evoke it for a few people, even for one person. There was a time when I held her hand and jumped into a puddle and when we opened our eyes we were in a new world. We saw the difference - the raindrops were a slightly different shade, the earth a different consistency - and couldn't for hours be certain that we'd returned.

The problem is not that I've stopped seeing these things. As vivid as ever, our invisible companions from junior high linger in doorways and lean against walls. When I stare at one point I can see them on the periphery of my vision. What I've lost is the power to express what I see in words.

I have less and less confidence in my strength with language these days. It grieves me because for a great part of my life I believed there were only two things I could do flawlessly, without fail: talk or write a mean streak that would blow you away, and be a good friend to her. In the last three years I've failed at both.

Years ago I wrote here that the only way to redeem loving poorly is by loving well. I would hope that someday I'll discover enough sense, serenity and syntactic talent to not always be making up for something.

I'm sad, and worried... but I'm also very content. I suppose, in the same vein as my yearning to find magic in the world, I wouldn't be much upset if those incredible clouds fell like rocks and cracked the earth, releasing a plague of zombies. Apocalypse would suit me, I think. I would go get my jeans and my leather jacket, learn to drive by stealing the first truck I saw, and head to Home Depot to pick me up a sledgehammer to bash in some undead skulls.

I'll take the end of the world, if you've got it. I'll take a portal to a magical dimension if that's on offer. So I suppose in that spirit feeling ashamed of myself and as if everything's a little bit unstable is a state I relish.

In other news... I downloaded a shit-ton of the Mamas and the Papas. I haven't listened to these guys since I was thirteen. I could sit here and look out the open door at the rain and listen to "California Dreamin'" for, oh... six hours.

I think I will.

Labels: Apocalypse, Hope, Magic

I've been trying to write an email to Sara for two weeks now. It's hard in a stupid way. By which I mean that it shouldn't be hard, and I know it shouldn't, and it is. So this is the coward's way out, I suppose... to clumsily say what I want to say in a place I know she'll find it eventually.

Look at that... I haven't changed at all, have I? Five, seven, nine years and I haven't changed a fucking bit. I'm everything that I ever was except more so. More lazy, more misanthropic, more shy, more difficult, more afraid, more desperate. It's so easy to make resolutions and follow through when we're teenagers. People telling us what to do makes it all the more urgent to do what we want to do. But now no one tells me what to do... so I don't do anything at all.

I was talking to Brian the other day. He asked me what was so hard about this email. "Why is it impossible for you to just chill the fuck out and deal with her naturally?" he asked me.

He's right. Everything that I remember is from years ago. We've talked since, certainly. My grasp on exact timelines is weak further back than about four years, but I'm certain we've talked about all of the weirdness and unhappiness several times, and I've definitely asked forgiveness at least twice, and been given it.

But it doesn't matter. I, who never regret anything, who am so unfamiliar with guilt that it took me this long just to realize that was what I was feeling - I've never forgiven myself for how I treated her. For everything I did on purpose and worse, all the mistakes I made out of simple ignorance. Some part of me is convinced that it's so far removed from her by now that my confusion, my guilt, my stupid inability to get over it and deal with her normally here and now - all of this must be utterly unfathomable to her. It's as if when I try to talk or write to her I'm shouting through a thick fog that I can't shake. I can't see properly or hear myself, and so I raise my voice - but the fog only exists for me. On the other side she's standing there wondering why I'm making such a big deal out of it. Wondering why I'm shouting, why I look like I'm blind.

Like it says up there: "You're not in the dark. I swim... in clouds of my own make."

I don't know how to break through. I don't know how to forgive myself for not understanding her right, for breaking promises, for lashing out, for stupid things that happened when I was sixteen and that now I can't for whatever reason get over. I don't know how to smile and say that my life is fine, my new house is beautiful, my job is ridiculously cool, and how are you? Where do I start?

It's like trying to build on a field full of immovable rubble. I can't clear it all away and start again, look at her like I never knew her before and be just myself and not me hobbled by the helpless sixteen-year-old I was, and get to know her again without all this bullshit baggage. And I can't work off of this basis. I can't make what I did and didn't do better. I can't forget and I don't know how to forgive myself.

It's so narcissistic... to be unable to see someone because you can't see past yourself. And yet even with me as fucking infuriating and helpless and feckless as I can be in her presence, her company is as fantastic as it always was. I miss her every day. Her comment below made my heart ache. I wish beyond everything else that I could just get the fuck over whatever my deal is and be her friend again, as confident and happy as I was when I first knew her. Wish I could just speak simply and not second-guess everything I say. I wish I could see her and know she's happy and her life is good and so maybe I don't have to feel guilty anymore. I wish I could convince my subconscious that it's as idiotic as she probably thinks I am.

I wish I could say I was sorry back then, when it mattered, instead of now, and two years ago, and four years ago. I wish I knew exactly what I should be sorry for and what's just me being crazy.

I wish I knew if I was even making sense.

Sara, I wish you were here.

I can't wait to figure out what's wrong with me
So I can say "this is the way that I used to be."

Labels: Apologies, Sara