9:35 p.m. - 06/07/03
do you think I am asking too much?
I don't think you understand. I'm going crazy (crazy, mind you) and outside there are sirens, and inside my mom is practicing her scales. We are down to an unbearable level of crazy.
Unbearable?
Yes. Jump out a window, fly into concrete, burst into flames, unbearable.
You're kidding.
Only to keep from meaning it.
What's up?
I can't do it. I can't not talk to Sara. She's the only person who understands and she's gone. And I have these pictures of people that I haven't seen in almost two years, and God, they are beautiful, but I swear they will tear me apart. These pictures will tear me apart. If anyone tried to take them away, I would bite and scream and run off with them, but I can't bear seeing those faces. I just can't. I can't bear thinking about Rogers. And those girls, those girls, are out there, living lives, and not letting me be a part of it, and maybe not even caring, and Jenna still has her fucking wall up, if only against me, and I can't take it. Not without Sara to call when I feel crazy and say, "Hey, remember that time when Tracy tried to climb before she'd made it onto yellow?" and have her know what and when I mean. I can't look at Dwight's smile, and Jenna's fish-slit eyes, and think how goddamn hard I fought to bring the smile out, and how it never was enough. I can't do it. And you know. She's just a girl. She's just a girl. I could go off like this on anyone, but it has to be on her. If I go off like this on her, then I don't have to think about the fact that what's really making me crazy are, like, sixty girls. Some guys. Three levels, three wards, acres and acres of forest, and two lakes. I don't have to think about what's really making me crazy: my parents aren't even living in the same house, which is not to imply anyone is happy when they do; there is no family to have here, and meanwhile, the one family I ever had is disintegrating. Entirely. Remember Tracy? She died. Remember Jenna? She doesn't remember me. Remember Brea and Stacy, who promised to write? I haven't heard from them in months. Remember Sara, who keeps me together, who keeps me from losing my entire goddamned mind? She's in a hospital because a fucking disease tore holes in her esophogas. Remember Mary? Remember her? Well, she's just lost it. She's just gone. She's just not capable of being anyone, especially not herself, without them. She's just broken, in a way that will never be fixable. Dave will never give an explanation that satisifies. He'll never give me permission to love them, and I'll never call to ask for it, and in my dreams I'll hug girls I barely spoke to, who mean more to me than whatever should mean the most... And then I'll just be gone. That has to happen eventually, right? Eventually, this has to tear me apart, too. There's just no way I can continually endure it. There's just no way I can be such a fucking trooper. I don't want to be. I don't want to be. Just give me twenty minutes in a room with them. Just give me time to ask questions and beg addresses and know that I'm not alone in being entirely lost without them.
You do not climb without a team. Spotters, belay team, a host of people who are there, entirely there, to make sure that even if, forty feet into the air, so high the trees look like thick grass, you fall you will not break. I'm not climbing anymore. I haven't been on a course in almost two years. (I haven't done anything in almost two years.) I'm on flat ground, trying to walk back and forth from room to room, and I am flying apart, exploding from the inside, shattering from memories. You do not give a girl whose never had a home the best one she could imagine and then take it the fuck away! You don't do that...
I want to go home. I can't say it anymore. I'm so tired of saying it. The only people who understand are cut off or in hospitals or waging wars they can't take breaks from to mend me. Remember me? I was the girl with the dark hair and glasses who never wore her hair down; I was the writer, who never talked in the beginning, and the veteran who chattered and tried to compell my secrets into your skin at the end. I was the girl in the first room on the left as you walked down the hallway from the office, in the bed you could see from the door. I was the girl who you said changed more than anyone, who you said was miraculous, who you finally recognized as a person instead of a receptacle for pain. I was that girl.
I want to be her again. I want to be her again. And I know, if it were anyone else, the words "I'm nothing without you" would hit me like plate glass, and I would say it isn't true. But it's not about a stupid girl or a stupid boy or a stupid love that didn't work out. It's home and family and the basic necessities of infancy through old-age, if I'm really expected to make it that whole way. I have to go home. I have to have a home. I have to...
Godfuckingdamnit. Take me home and leave me there.
chord
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