I know at what point in my life I became the perpetual also-ran... and I also know the point at which it became miserable.

There was a time when I was happy to be someone's lady-in-waiting - and oh, how instructive that term is, because waiting is what you do - I was happy to live my life in the service of another, because another person was worth that. Because she was so beautiful, so good, so worthy, that knowing she relied on me was all I needed to feel all of those things too.

Hands touch
Eyes meet
Sudden silence
Sudden heat
Hearts leap in a giddy whirl
He could be that boy
But I'm not that girl.

Then she learned not to need me, and I not to need her. But somehow I never managed to get much farther than being that girl - the best friend, the sidekick, the person standing next to the person who has all the luck, all the love, all the attention. I listen to songs, I watch movies, I read books, and there has never been one I read where I didn't think, "No. I'm not that girl. I'm that girl's friend, the person she takes for granted."

Don't dream too far
Don't lose sight of who you are
Don't remember that rush of joy.
He could be that boy
But I'm not that girl.

Love... my love, whoever you are. I am so very, very tired of being taken for granted. I am so tired of not being the one things happen to. I'm tired of not being the lucky one, not being the pretty one, not being the one people listen to. I'm tired of suffering everyone's bullshit because of all the people responsible for whatever happened, I'm the person made to be fucking kicked. I'm the person who doesn't fit in, so the failures of the group are attached to me, inevitably.

Every so often we long to steal
To the land of what might have been
But that doesn't soften the ache we feel
When reality sets back in.

I have never stopped wondering what I'm doing wrong.

All I want in the world is someone I trust to tell me what it is. Perhaps all of this sounds ragingly immature, but I don't care. We are all children, we are all alone, we are all so terribly, terribly broken and worthy of compassion. I am tired of giving it. I am tired of being everyone's guardian, everyone's caretaker, everyone's mother. Just once in my life I would like to need help and have someone come along and solve the problem, simply and completely, without my assistance. I am so very, very tired of being the only adult in the room. And I am so very tired of never, ever being allowed to be as helpless, as juvenile, as lazy, as feckless, as blind, as careless as everyone else. When is it my turn to blunder dumbly through a day, hurting feelings, and be showered with affection at the end of it in spite of it all? When is it my turn to reap rewards I didn't earn, to be vexed by the sheer volume of attention and adoration I'm showered with? When is it my turn to have a fucking first-world problem?

Blithe smile
Lithe limb
She who's winsome
She wins him
Gold hair with a gentle curl
That's the girl he chose
And heaven knows
I'm not that girl.

This does seem to happen, doesn't it. It's two am. It's my birthday, now. I have cried myself to sleep on more birthdays than not. Perhaps that's a juvenile score to keep track of, but there it is. I am twenty-five, halfway to thirty, and I still don't know how to be the person I have to be. I still don't know how to be strong without sometimes needing to be weak. I still don't know when it's okay to be, or who's supposed to keep everything safe when I am.

Don't wish
Don't start
Wishing only wounds the heart
I wasn't born for the rose and the pearl
There's a girl I know
He loves her so
I'm not that girl.

Will I always feel like a fuck-up? I hate to start another year this way. I hate to go into it knowing that I still feel disregarded, forgotten, taken for granted. I hate to spend another year bending over backwards to consider the people who matter, only to realize that I was the only person who considered it at all.

Last year was so very, very bad. There have been few worse. I want to believe that making the next better is in my hands, but I might have done all the working uphill I'm able for a while. I'm at the point now where I'm ready to give up... and for the first time, not even begin to care about who picks up the slack.

Movies, TV screens reflect
Just what you expected
There's a world of shiny people
Somewhere else.

Out there following their bliss
Living easy, getting kissed
While you wonder
What else you're doing wrong.

Every day it starts again.
You cannot say if you're happy.
You keep trying to be.
Try harder.
Maybe this is not your year.

Labels: Apologies, Brendon, Introspection, Katrina

I don't get many things right the first time
In fact, I am told that a lot
Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls
Brought me here.

And where was I before the day
That I first saw your lovely face?
Now I see it every day.
And I know

That I am
I am
I am the luckiest.

What if I'd been born fifty years before you
In a house on the street where you lived?
Maybe I'd be outside as you passed on your bike
Would I know?

And in a white sea of eyes
I see one pair that I recognize.
And I know

That I am
I am
I am the luckiest.

I love you more than I have ever found a way to say to you.

Next door there's this old man who lived to his nineties
And one day passed away in his sleep
And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days
And passed away.

I'm sorry, I know that's a strange way to tell you that I know
We belong
That I know

That I am
I am
I am the luckiest.

I'm tired. I'm tired of being afraid I'm going to turn into a crazy person. I'm tired of being afraid that I already am. I'm tired of having a chip on my shoulder, and being insecure, and being lonely, and feeling left out, and feeling like I don't do anything that matters. I'm tired of listening to people TELL me that what I do doesn't matter, I'm tired of my loved ones letting me believe that, I'm tired of telling myself that I'm going to get my life together and thinking that I'll know when I do by how my life looks how my mom says it should. I'm tired of not being proud of myself, and not wanting to look at myself, and getting sick of my own company.

I don't know how to fix anything. I don't know how to make myself better, or how to start believing that I don't need to get better, or how to know if I do. I don't want to be lonely but I don't want to have to act like the fucking cool kids to make friends. I don't want to be left out, but if I have to tell you to include me it ruins it. I don't want to be insecure and I don't want to be humorless or act like a crazy intolerable fucking girl, but I can't take it when you joke about me being demanding when I'm so fucking scared that I'm being demanding. I don't want to call you and I don't pick up the phone when you call because I don't think you want to talk to me. And then you don't call, for months, and I feel like it's my fault.

I'm tired of not being good enough, not ever, no matter what I do. I'm tired of feeling like I'm the same fuck-up I've always been except worse now because I don't have an excuse anymore. I'm tired of feeling like I've wasted all of these years because I can't justify them to you in a way you give a shit about. I'm tired of avoiding your calls during the day because I know you'll nag me about all the things I need to do, and avoiding your calls at night because you get emotional when you're drunk and I don't know how to handle that. It makes me headshy and I never know if your next words are going to be "you're my puppy and I love you" or "you're a cold, aggressive monster."

I'm tired of being jealous, and being ashamed of being jealous, and trying to swallow my jealousy, and trying to logic myself out of it, and trying to ignore it. I'm tired of feeling like a stupid, crazy girlfriend and not being able to stop. I'm tired of second- and third-guessing every goddamn thing I say because none of it's rational the way I want to be, none of it's reasonable the way I want to be, none of it's serene and beautiful and wise the way I want to be. It's all just fucking bile and whimpering confusion and I hate it. I wish there was more than that inside me. I'm not sure anymore that there is.

I don't know how I can expect to satisfy my mom when I haven't been satisfied with anything I am since I was thirteen years old. I thought getting older would be easier - I'd get nice and fucking complacent, worry about taxes and bills, and not cry myself to sleep like a teenager. Instead I'm more insecure than I've ever been, and every day I see myself turning into someone I can't stand and trying to step on every impulse and feeling that pops up in an effort to stop that process is only making it worse.

I wish all of this didn't feel like worthless, whiny first-world-problems bullshit.

Labels: Apologies, Brendon, Brian, Introspection, Katrina, Lies, Love, Rants, Stress

Who's seen Jezebel
She was born to be the woman I would know
And hold like a breeze
Half as tight as both our eyes closed.

For the first time, in this place, I am speaking to no one. I hear my voice fall flat in this garden, sink into the numb earth and drown, forgotten.

Since ever I began writing this way, in this declamatory fashion, I had a vision of a small, familiar court of listeners, composed of those I loved in life and fiction, each and every soul of every description who held some power over me. One by one, that court melted away while I wasn't looking. Now I speak and I hear myself echo.

Ananias is pinned to the page by my words, no longer alive in my head. He has told his story and has nothing more to say.

Procell and Adsartha are silenced by circumstance, their mute eyes no longer even opening at the sound of my voice.

Who else would I have found here once? Who else did I speak to, or speak around, knowing that sooner or later they would stumble upon it? Like leaving notes on the path, I led my loved ones on a hunt to find them, and took comfort in knowing that however long it took, my whispers would eventually reach a welcoming ear.

Now these words are only read when I sit a person down on purpose and make it so. No more hunts, no more floating thoughts suspended for months and made richer by the wait, no more quiet surprises when you, or you, or you read your name by my hand months after I've spoken of you, with reverence or with pain. No more bites on my line, though I string it with love and bait it with honesty. The lake is dry, perhaps. The wellspring is gone.

I miss you all. I miss your voices in my head. I miss your faithfulness and your hope, knowing that it might take me an age but I would be back here, always back here, whispering again. During which long silence might I have spoken the word that held you?

My ka-tet... was it ka drew you away? Did I miss it? Is there somewhere I should be?

Who's seen Jezebel
She was gone before I ever got to say
"Lay here, my love
You're the only shape I'll pray to, Jezebel..."

Labels: Aaron, Brendon, Brian, Brock, Jeremy, Katrina, Missing You, Sara, You

I've got so much to ask you
It's never the time
Why would I spoil a perfect evening?

She doesn't need me anymore.

I know that should hurt. It does, a little. Not as much as I would have expected ten years ago.

I'm in the transitive stage out of adolescence and into adulthood. I have... ambivalent feelings about that. As I mentioned to Brian recently, I constantly find myself checking my own assumptions and actions against what I believed when I was thirteen, fifteen, sixteen - constantly asking myself, "If who I was could see me now, would I hate me?" I'm never quite certain of the answer. I can already feel myself justifying, rationalizing, settling even. As a teenager I was a creature of infinite passion and conviction... but then again, which one of us was not. I abhorred beyond all else the willingness to accept, to bend, to compromise. Of course, that doesn't survive childhood. It can't possibly - unless that too is just something I tell myself. Nevermind.

I can't be certain of anything anymore. I miss that. People say that teenagers think they know everything. I think the reason it bothers adults is because they're envious. I would give anything to be as perfectly, unshakably assured of the right path, of my own place on it, of the right thing to say and the things I wanted. There was a time when I would have said proudly that I had no regrets in my life, no guilt, and no sins. I remember understanding my own internal logic and morals and believing with flawless clarity that I had never violated them. I might make mistakes, or hurt others, but at the age of sixteen I had never done a thing in my life that I had thought was wrong.

My mother would laugh. I probably would too, in another mood. But I do miss that peace of mind. I cried myself to sleep more often than not in those days, sure, but I never had trouble sleeping. I never worried. I had grief and passion aplenty, but no stress. I had the answers I needed, and the ones I didn't have, I knew for certain I could figure out between me and Katrina.

That was it, wasn't it. Even as I got older and started to find things to feel guilty about, even when I made mistakes that I couldn't take back and hurt people in ways I couldn't fix, I still could tell myself that there was one thing I had always, always done well: I had always been her friend, and always done right by her. I never lied to her and never knowingly hurt her.

The trouble, I guess... is that those distinctions no longer have meaning. Hurting someone by accident doesn't make it okay. Sometimes even "sorry" doesn't. Sometimes nothing makes it okay, no matter what you do. I spent my adolescence never regretting or knowing what it meant to live with guilt, and to this day I have no idea how to absorb it. Something in me still expects a flawless record, still expects me to acquit myself with unfaltering righteousness at least by my own standards. When asked to accept that I have done wrong and cannot ever, ever repair the damage, it seems to go into some kind of grim loop. It can't begin to live with that. It can't even understand the premise.

So I got older and up until I was nineteen I still believed, at least in this one thing, I had never broken faith. And of course, when doubt came to that, it came to everything else. I don't have answers anymore. I'm no longer certain that I've ever done the right thing, because I have no idea what that might be. And there's guilt here, where there never was before.

This place we've come to now, this unhappy, rather frozen place between us, is so strange and yet, in hindsight, so inevitable that I can't help but wonder what would have become of us if she had stayed here, if we hadn't been separated. If I had been able to share that time with her, able to involve her in every tiny loss of confidence, and vice versa... what would we be now? Can anything so rarefied and pure as that bond survive the corruption, the corrosion of conviction that comes with growth? I am not the person I was, no. Nor she. But as I wonder whether these two people we are now will ever find common ground again, I'm forced to wonder whether, under any circumstances, we could have. Was this unavoidable? Is it worse if it was, or better? If I had spent the last five years in her constant company, as I spent the five before them, would we have found some way to preserve one another's sanguinity, or would it just have meant being forced to watch an inexorable erosion up close?

She doesn't need me anymore, not the way she used to. That would hurt more if I didn't know that it's been years since I needed her the way I did. It's been years since I cried myself to sleep because I didn't know how to help her. Years since she was the only one who knew me well, the only one I trusted, the only one I would kill or die for.

That betrayal, at the very least, was inevitable. I'm not fool enough to think otherwise. Unless I was to live alone forever, waiting on her time - which itself would eventually poison any relationship - at some point I had to find someone else to depend upon. I know that that didn't make it any less painful for her, and it doesn't make me feel less guilty. Every other infinitesimal act of neglect sprung from that, I believe. The last five years of numbly, nervously struggling to make things fit again like they used to... all of that came from that point, somewhere between when I was tormented by wondering what I would do if she moved away and when I found a way to live with it. Just that... finding a way to live without her.

I'm not the only one. She's found a way too, I believe. Trouble is, I'm no longer certain. Not certain of anything in general, and not certain of her in particular. We're not honest with one another the way we were... that excruciating, unflinching honesty that was the centerpoint of everything we shared. It's not the same. I omit things out of fear of judgement, she omits them out of... what? By definition, I don't know. I no longer know her mind. No longer grok her, as it were.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that it won't be fixed this way. Won't be fixed by bi-weekly phone calls where she talks about work and her boyfriend and I listen and try to find ways to share in it all, phone calls where I struggle to find things to tell her about a life she doesn't understand and I'm afraid to try to explain, a life whose particulars are so powerful to me and so mundane to her that, for the first time, the things that bring me bliss and pain and passion and power are completely and utterly trivial to her, and I am silenced by that knowledge. Without her here, with me and willing to devote real time to starting over, to retracing our paths to find where it was we went astray and bring one another up to speed, there's nothing we can do.

So here I am. Half of me trying, as it always has, to carry on pragmatically. To live without her and to live with my mistakes, to swallow doubt and regret and be glad of the joy in my life and try not to remember what I've lost. Half of me looking at myself from ten years ago and railing against my compromises, raging at myself for being lazy and fat and complacent and content, constantly tugging at everything I've messed up and can't repair, certain - always so certain! - that somewhere there are the right words to make everything right again.

I wish I knew them. I wish I could believe they exist.

I wish love was enough.

Labels: Introspection, Katrina, Love, Missing You, Stress

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

Here it is... I'm biased, maybe, but I think it's beautiful. Whaddaya think, chiquita?



That aside, and oh, how hard it is to set aside... that aside, though, a few thoughts from the past few days.

The other night... oh, the past couple days have been unsettling. Just strange things, you know... upheavals. A lot to adjust to, still adjusting. That, and being moody in general, hasn't made me easy to predict, I think. I have to apologize to my beloveds, for being hot-and-cold. Just trying to make sense of things. I thought I was regaining my confidence in some senses, and I suppose I still am. But there's also something I'm discovering... that I don't have all the answers. I used to, I swear to God. I used to always know exactly the right thing to say to everybody, and it worked, and it made things okay. It always came to my head right when I needed it. But now... I hardly ever know. I... I would say that I failed for the first time this week. I mean, I make mistakes. I don't accomplish some things. But when I set out to do good, to really heal someone, and when I give it everything I have... I've never failed before. But understand that I'm not unhappy about this as such. It's a blow, but what I'm thinking is that this loss of surety is in some way maturity. Realizing that I don't have all the answers, realizing that my problems may not be easy just because I'm smart. Realizing that I can't help everyone... and I don't have to. Being able to weigh what I have against what I can risk and discovering what measures I can and can't afford to take.

The night before last I lay in the dark, listening to my beautiful one's heartbeat. I was crying... discombobulated by Jeremy's leaving among other things. I guess of late I've been crying more than I ever have before... the funny thing is that it's not that I feel like crying any more than I used to. I'm ten times happier on a regular basis than ever in my life. But the fact is that I no longer try not to cry. When I feel like it, I do, because I know there's someone who will take every moment of it seriously and comfort me. Which is wonderful, but also perhaps not good, because I'm not always crying for the most momentous reasons. Sometimes I cry when I'm frustrated, or thwarted, or tired, or sick. I cry for stupid reasons too, and they really are stupid reasons. I'm emotional enough at times that anything can set me off... and I don't want to frighten those who love me by letting them believe that these occurances are anything earth-shattering. I'm just a girl... more and more these days. Funny, huh?

So I laid there, feeling shaken, and feeling unhappy because I've been, for some reason, afraid of the dark lately, and then... I don't know. When I'm feeling scared or... well, emotional at all, really, I talk. So I did. For a half an hour, forty minutes, maybe more... I laid there and listened to his heartbeat and whispered to him, telling him maybe a thousand times that I loved him, and every single thing I could think of that I loved, in the order they came to my head. His collarbones, the way he holds me, the way he looks so helpless when he laughs. Everything. And he slept, and that was all right... I talked myself to sleep. I do this sometimes. My head never stops telling stories.

And now for something completely different... kind of...
We watched "Chasing Amy" tonight. (Pop culture contamination... I almost typed "Judging Amy." Somebody fucking save me, we have a TV now!) It was fine. Y'know, the kind of cute intelligent romantic thing, like When Harry Met Sally, it's good, I like it, it's the kind of romantic movie I actually admit to having enjoyed. No, dammit, we don't have "Down With Love" on our shelf, I don't care what you saw!

I was thinking... god, women are strange. Men... men make a lot more sense sometimes. It's easier to understand pieces. When something is whole it is of necessity contained within itself... and thus mysterious.
When you argue with someone and they walk out on you, everyone leaves a hole in the room, right? Like you can hear it echoing, the space feels unnatural. But the thing is... women always do that. No matter what. No matter if it's an argument or just a quiet trip to the kitchen. Every woman leaves a hole in every room she exits. Ask me why. I have no fucking clue. Vacuums inside vacuums... too much space. There's a resonating tone that doesn't still.
I haven't hung out with enough girls lately, I guess. Gotta get Tina's ass over here.
So tired... but I feel good. I feel safe... I feel lucky. I feel female, too. Figure me that.

Labels: Brendon, Introspection, Jeremy, Katrina, Missing You