6:46 p.m. - 06/23/03
<<*quickest girl in the frying pan]}-
I'm scared to start today. Yesterday's emotional outpouring (after some 60 hours of restraining myself from feeling) still lingers, makes me afraid to type again. But I know enough to be afraid, also, of not feeling, afraid that I was able to turn myself off for those two-and-one-half days. I'm scared to know what I have to say, but I remember mutism too well not to find the words and say them. If I start now, I'll have an hour before my mom comes home, an hour to myself, emotions free and safe.
There's too much dark, and I hate all of it. I hate all of it. I hate diaryland (of all things! ...I hate a miracle) for its dark corners and its lack of light shining in through cracked and broken rooms. I hate not being able to make myself the light. I want to do it right now, so badly; I want to write in nourish and post at caged. I want to show the world how much brightness there is, but what a burden, to be that sun. What is to give light must endure burning, and I've always had mixed feelings about whether or not I was the sort of person who could bear that. Whether I even wanted to be. I don't want to endure anything; I'm tired of suffering. I want the light present because I want to experience it, but I'm too tired to be that light myself. I can't be the one to go to caged right now and tell a happy story. I can't write in nourish of all the glorious re-learning that's occurred. I can't believe I live in the same world I did six years ago; so much of how I see has changed. But I'm scared and I'm sad and I'm withering in this exile, vegetating, waiting because I don't know how to find light that doesn't drain me. I want to give it, to receive it, to be it, but I don't have the strength right now. Right now, all my darknesses have collected into something I have to face, have to choose to search and express honestly; right now I cannot be the sunbeam in the fog. But I need that sunbeam so desperately. I'm fighting to survive on something not inside me, and that frightens me. I'm surviving on letters and e-mails and that's too close to how things used to be; I'm scared it means that I've gone back. The strength is supposed to be inside me. I'm supposed to want this life: to be a person of the light. What else have I ever wanted?
Peace. Home. Light is energy, and you can't give it when you're drained almost to the core. I don't have the extra energy. I don't have the minimum requirement of energy. I don't have the sparks and the flames and the beams and the rays and the full-out blinding suns inside of me, not now. And I miss them. Why are they so hard to find? Why is it that, so often in my life, when I want something I have to build it out of air, rather than reach out for a resource already there? Why can't there be more times where I say what I need, and it's visible, it's obvious, it's right there, waiting to be mine. I'm tired of building homes and bridges out of earth and sand and mud. I'm tired of building survival out of shabby personhood. I know I'm good, I know I'm loved, I know I'll be alright. But I don't want this darkness now. I want something to counter all the storms, and why do I have to be the one who knows it? Such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But why does there always have to be a need? Why can't there be more times when the one on the shelf says what I need to hear? Why must I talk to myself, ask my own advice - why can't sometimes there be another person with as good an answer.
I'm at that place again. I don't want to take care of me. If I have to do it, that must mean no one else wants to. And if no one else wants to, that must mean I'm bad. If no one else can, that must mean I'm alone. I'm the only one here, the only one left to dig myself out of this mess, and it's not that I don't have the skills or the tools; it's that I want to be handed a fucking rope this time. I want to be pulled up out of the earth by something other than my own sharp teeth and broken nails.
I want to be saved. How stupid is that? I love my life so much because of how throughly mine it is. I know I like myself, even in a week like this when the depression's so thick I'm barely awake, because I remember all of my self that I discovered in the process of saving it. I don't want anyone to come along and play christ with me. I don't want anyone to come into my life and save me; I'd be scared away. I recognize caretaking; I do it myself too often not to see the markings, step away. But how do I explain to an illness that doesn't give vacations and a recovery that requires non-stop attention that I'm tired? Yes. The almighty Mary Brave, the wonder-girl, the poster-child, the wanta-be role-model who burdens herself with the perceived perceptions of others is tired. It's so stupid to be so real. Of course I'm tired; I'm human. But tired? What a stupid thing. I continue to get through every terrible, awful circumstance that falls into my life, and I'm going to be done in by fatigue? By my lack of endurance? I know (almost) two years of recovery is a long time. I know six years of sickness (or eighteen, or who knows how many) are overwhelming, and I have the right to be tired. I know that this is too much to handle, and it's ok that I'm sitting in the mess asking life to get serious. This can't be serious. I fight off horrific villains everyday, and I'm going to be defeated by my own inability to just. keep. going ...?
Of course not. Right? Of course not. Mary doesn't stop. Mary isn't defeated. Mary has choices. Mary's going to win. Of course I can keep going, of course I can keep at it, of course one day I will be light again, even if the darkness- in the meantime - never lifts. I just want something pretty to stroke in the meantime. No. I want someone pretty, and I want them stroking me. I want parents or friends or siblings who don't make the pain worse, and I know that most of the people reading this are as sorry as I am that they can't come over and hold me. I know. I have the best love in the world, so I won't lose. But I'll get tired. Bone-crazy, muscle-deep exhausted. The type of tired where your insides scramble to tear through your skin and your skin struggles for stillness against it. Where the earth has stopped moving, but everything inside you spins on and on and on... Split. I want to go to sleep, and I want to run out into the world and scream my presence. I want a coma and I want to pound against a window, run into a street, and cry like a wild girl, finally loose, finally free.
I know I'm going to be alright. I almost really do. But that going to be wrings me out now and again; I get tired of living for something that takes so long to come, and can be lost in such little time. I look into the moment, thinking I want to grab at the trinkets of beauty in the here-and-now. And it's darkness. Too many others are tired. I want to snack on someone else's nourishment awhile, bum from someone else's store. And I know there is light out there, I know it, I feel it, I have to believe...but it doesn't stretch to D!@#$%^. I must light lamps and pretend it's the same. Lack of light aids depression and bulimia, two enemies I cannot abed. Lack of light leads to lack of vision, leads to where am I? I can't see myself. I can't feel myself.
Leads to curling up in corners, habitually, stumbling into them in the vague and terrifying space, and screaming that I have to go home. That is, assuming, that home exists also. That home will someday reach me, too.
I need someone who can sit me down and hand me sparklers. I need to break down in the presence of someone who knows how to hold me, and how to nudge me so that I reassemble afterward, when everything true has come out. I need an interim solution, some reprieve.
I need home. Maybe the 678,003-rd time I say that is the charm...
chord
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