Decisions

He tried to break up with me this Friday. Rode his bike to me, said he wanted to see me, begot a twisted irony because just two weeks prior he had rode his bike all the way to my house to comfort me and hold me.

It was an odd encounter. I smirked at times, realizing I was giving him the same defensive stance I give to bullies and broken friendships. He said he was confused, and that at my very doorstep things changed, because I saw his anguished face and touched his shoulder and asked if he was alright. I thought, perhaps, that someone had died.

We left with him saying that he needed time to think. To sort a muddled brain, to keep it safe and sound, apparently, from the pheromones I drug it with. That night I couldn't eat well; I went to Wendy's with a boy whose eyes are crystals and I saw two junkie prostitutes with skin stretched over their bones, with rotting teeth and the faces of old women. I couldn't stop staring, trying to eavesdrop on conversations from a foreign world to no avail. He had become a stranger, just as unreadable and inhuman as them.

The next day he changed his mind, which I had hoped he would do, in the back of mind. I told him, I never wanted us to be exclusive when I leave. Remember? And, it hurts me more to hear that you want to break up with me not because you've found someone better--we both know there are better--but simply for the sake of some doom that is bound to come.


If we find someone, through light flirtations and inquisitive dates, then so be it: we will end it. But why cut it off now? I don't understand your logic, I said.

So in this way he gave in, I made him admit that he still loved me even if he didn't think we were right for each other. He tried to leave me; I stopped him. I couldn't let it happen--there is no one else, absolutely no one, who I can lean on but him. It is a sad truth and I wish I didn't have to cause this burden, but soon I will go to college and there will be room to grow.

In the meantime, I refuse to be abandoned. There are so many things I love about him. I just want a friend who I can cuddle with, sit and spill my secrets with, laugh and cry with. I do enjoy making love, or having sex, or fucking--whatever you want to call it. In this one area of life I forgo feminist stubbornness because I really do wish to please.

Conclusively, in a mere few weeks we will be officially calling ourselves "on hiatus." But that's not quite what it is--it's not quite an open relationship, either. I go for the in-between of in-betweens, the hardest to keep in equilibrium. But the thing is, if you succeed, you have almost the best of everything. Same with Ana, isn't it?

He

failed his road test. And I feel like I'm only wanted for the love that I make. And my body refuses to be hungry, I swear, so I'm shaking and heavy-lidded.

The University

at my camp is nostalgic. Not in the way that people find pretty. It is the relic of a past we'd like to forget, embarrassingly out-of-date until 100 years from now when no one, not the most ancient of elders, can remember a time when it was new--any memories of exhilaration over the feat of its construction, its grandness and its hope of the future, have been washed out of human generations. And only when this happens, of course, will the people stare at the ancient thing in awe.

The Ivies possess the charm of the ages, but not this school. It has yet to see a time when people do not look at it with disgust. But human nature, fickle as it is, is also predictable. The cyclic rhythm exists as always; the stones will sit still and wait.


Knowing this is why I find an allure that no one else sees. I sit in a crevice I just found, a lonely cracked balcony surrounded by tress. It is circular, concrete and brick, and grass peaks out of its radial symmetry, The border has 3 steps like a tiny coliseum, as if the architect expected people to gather and talk and laugh within it.


But it looks like I've found ruins from a long-gone past, a precious artifact in decay. I sit on the brick, so no one can look up and see a strange girl sitting all alone.


I watch the sap droplets from the pines, and the ants, and the ashen cigarettes.
Creatures tweet and scutter, forgetting my lone presence.
This is a sanctuary.

One can't be rejected here, because already it's become a place that no one wants to touch.

So

apparently I've lost a bit of weight. According to two analog scales, which I normally don't trust but with two of them.. I've dipped into the "criteria" of anorexia with my BMI--bull anyway, and a symptom that many twist into a goal, but I'm supposing that means I'm unhealthy? I don't doubt it. I constantly feel like a crackhead and I wouldn't be surprised if some day soon my bones caved in from osteoporosis..

But anyway, my camp/research is occupying; it keeps me sane until the weekend rolls around. Although for the life of me I can't choose healthy things to eat there--pizza, giant corn muffins, Amp, coffee, cookies...and everyone around me eating these exotic salads and Greek yogurt.



Matt's getting his driver's license this friday. Maybe it will be as revolutionary as imagined, exciting and liberating. Or maybe it'll just prove to me that it's not the freedom, it's the relationship. I don't know.

I'm anxious, though, restless. Waiting to do something big. (Like college? my sanity would ask.) But that's what happens, isn't it? We get into a routine, however foreign it was to us a mere few days ago, and it becomes daily life. And then we search, yearn for something beyond, to satiate our adrenaline.

I want to drape myself in silks and feathers, paint red on my lips and darken the souls of my eyes. I want to wear antique high-healed red doll shoes, and banish every blemish on my face. Pretend to be beautiful and fae-like, convince myself of this. And then look in the mirror, as if I had someplace to go.

Get Ready, Get Set

Here's to the limbo that loves me no matter how much I say I don't love it back. Inhaling and exhaling ethanol in grateful breaths, because I will only feed my body with liquid chemicals. Coffee and diet coke, anyone?


I saw my therapist for the last time this year on Monday. And my group, last Wednesday. Ten months she said it's been. Crazy. I can't even tell if it sounds too short or too long.


Prom tomorrow, science research camp Monday morning. Six weeks of what I'm going to pray will be fun and stimulating and busy and away from this damn house. Then college, 4 years time. This week better end.
Cross your fingers.

My mother is mad at me because I don't do anything right. Momentarily, that is. When I try to say I'm sorry after the fact--something I never do, but I figured it would be the "effective" thing to do in the language of my therapist--she rejects it. Just brought up my failure anew, from the depths of amnesia. Fuck me, then. I should have let her make things all dandy again in an hour, like I usually do. While I lock myself in my room and continue to feel like shit. Play music about anorexia and death and drug addicts; not that she ever notices.

I'm so sick of this two-faced shit. How bout I stop eating, kill two birds with one stone? Maybe you'll notice something after a few days. And, I won't be leeching off your grocery bills.

Sickly Innocent

We had to watch a movie today, for seniors. They told us this time was "the deadly hundred days," warning us of the reckless, euphoric toasts that ravage innocence fully if it hasn't been done already. To be honest, it just made me want to close my door to the world and drink to the sadness of it. Which is what I did.

My boyfriend, my brother and I were harassed while waiting for my mother to pick us up. A pitiful "meathead," as M calls him, was begging for any excuse to fight. He pushed him, threatening to break his jaw, and called me a cunt when I said he needed anger management. My brother kept saying that he would've beaten him up; his idiotic naivety was embarrassing.

M called his friend, a former drug dealer but the sweetest kid I've ever met. He's got rep though, and muscle, and he convinced the meathead to stop bothering us. A sudden crash into the harshest dark corners of the world, for me. A place where strangers threaten to break your bones, and stature is measured by bloody memories. My hands shook with fear, despite myself.

And here I was, a well-groomed sheltered girl living on the upside of town. Prepared to counter snobs and gossip girls and rich douchebags, but not this--not this sheer brutality. Not shady streets and black-eyed girls, not strung-out addicts and ravenous gangs of men. I don't know if I ever will be.

So isn't it swell then, that I'm going to a school of the primped and preened elite? People with high-minded ideas and sophisticated tastes, who buy expensive vintage clothes and shop organic, attend charity events and discuss politics over a bottle of chardonnay?

It's civilized to the point of being superficial, fake and contrived. Why do I feel such rage and shame to admit that this world is the only place I could ever belong?

I'm not broken in the way that counts. Abuse, neglect, poverty, broken homes. I can't say I know how it feels.

Instead I have the maladies of perfection. Masquerades teach you to hide behind a smile and dance as if everyone was watching. Asking, begging the masses to look on with jealous eyes. I know it's a malady that everyone wants--and in so, so many ways I should be grateful.

But even so, the desperate yearnings of escape, which seem to drive all human vices, are in essence
one and the same.