Let's see...

Complete my paperwork due tomorrow?

OR:

Read comic books in the bathtub until I get sleepy?

I mean, really, what would you do after a ten-hour workday?

A Mirror Not Quite Firmly Fastened

I am learning how to be lonely. It is a difficult process, and for the most part I've never really had to go through it before.

Not to say that spending so much time alone is a bad thing; on the contrary, I've been teaching myself to rely on myself for amusement, support, and strength. If I can't enjoy being by myself, I'll never enjoy being with others.

But it's strange, living alone, sleeping alone, spending my afternoons alone. My weekends. And, for the first time in my life, I'm lonely-- and it's not the panicked, spontaneous bursts of "loneliness" I'd experience when left on my own for a few hours back when I was living with or dating someone. It's a quieter, deeper and more chronic ache... like that feeling you get at the base of your skull right before you know a big headache is about to hit.

I'm reading a lot, cleaning. Cooking. Taking walks. Listening to music, writing, working out at the gym. Most of all and behind all of that, however, I have a sense that I'm waiting for something. I can't really say what it is. It's a nagging feeling somewhere in the back of my brain that something will come through my door and change my life. Like I'm teetering on the edge of some giant alteration: security of habit is missing now, and I am on my own.

I want to be fascinating. The great narcissist in me rears its ugly head and claims my right to be worshiped, but other than instant gratification I see no merit in the idea; it is not genuine to be loved in such a way. But I am unsatisfied with anything less. If someone were to find me fascinating, to be interested in all aspects of me, to show it on a regular basis (important) --but not to make me the last possible answer (just as important)-- I think I should be happy. I don't know how to seek these people out. It is a balance I do not find in myself or others. It seems we are either all or nothing, always. So I am lonely.

I am tired, and rambling, and have put myself in a bad mood as a result. Not sure that any of this makes any sense. I'll read it in the morning, most likely, and laugh at myself.

"Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say at night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall." -Max Richter

Armadillidium

Sudden black across the carpet
A spot, a stain, and I go
To fetch a towel, but
Upon closer inspection
She is a woodlouse, pill-bug,
Tiny isopod mountaineering
In the fantastic fibers
Of the floor. I ask
Where she is headed
But receive no reply except
A vague wave of her feelers;
She is far too busy navigating
To pause for conversation.
With just cause, too-- I imagine
My feet as she would see them:
Gigantic, grotesque, monstrous pink
Cliffs in the distance. She curls
Into a ball when she notices them,
And I am hurt: I always thought
My feet rather lovely.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I find that in times of desperation, when I am struggling with my own humanity, I always come back to T.S. Eliot. I've never thought to question why.

And indeed there will be a time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

[...]

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoon,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

-"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
T.S. Eliot, excerpt

How true.

Arguments are won intellectually, Sarah; not love.

Tallyho,
The Universe

Love is won, Sarah, with a dash of trust, a smidge of fear, and a pinch of letting go.

A Note to the Universe

I'm not a particularly religious person. I'm very spiritual, however, and it helps me cut through the muck and focus on the bright things. Not saying my life is like a magpie in a garbage heap, but I'm realizing that every time I run back through my posts I can feel the frustration seeping out of them. I rarely write about my happy moments because I'm out living them. And believe me, there are far more of those than the negative ones.

I remind myself a lot that I'm in good hands. Something's out there holding me up. I've never messed up too badly to truly ruin something. I've never gotten myself into a situation that was impossible to get out of. I am meticulous with my work and sloppy with my emotions, and that's okay-- it's me. I wouldn't feel right being any other way.

So thank you, Something. I owe you one.

Rosemary for Remembrance

As I was leaving
my father picked a sprig
and hesitated a moment
before placing it on my dashboard.
"Rosemary," he said,
"for remembrance."
The resin prickle slid its arms
around my neck
and cuddled my head
with every gust of the air vents.
And so I drove, and remembered.

The bunch and strain of the horse's muscles
beneath my legs as she threw me, the wind
in my eyes and blood in my nose,
the way she looked so proud
to have rid of me.
The green-eyed girl slumped, exhausted
over her guitar, wheat curls tangling
the strings, her shy mouth
as I kissed it. Stringing popcorn.
The rust stain on my cotton panties.
Learning to parallel park.

The winter we tramped through snow
what seemed like miles to fill our
knapsacks with groceries, how blissful
the baked goods section felt with heat
seeping through my boots.
The sweeping grey-blue of the Sound.
An old green quilt. The robin's egg
I crushed in my chubby toddler's palm
and my tears over the murder of
something so perfect. My grandmother's
paper hands as she died. The moon off
my legs floating in the lake. Skin
that smelled like warm towels
and corn husks, like sky.

My greatest loves, every painful turn
in the gut, each delicious shudder
of hope, every lie, every tingle of contact,
I remembered. I remembered.
The wall of green gave way on the road
at my right, petering out to sand.
I switched lanes to watch the sun melt
in peripheral, buttery,
over the curve of my shoulder.
I remembered.

All of the Side-Effects with None of the Catholicism

I struggle so hard to be perfect on the outside that I end up killing myself on the inside. For what? I can't make everyone happy, and on a surface level I recognize that. But disappointment in me is something I apparently can't handle from other people-- I crumble under the weight of it. And no matter what, I always disappoint.

I don't really understand where things started to go wrong for me. I'm a happy person. I love openly, with my full heart. I try my absolute hardest to take care of the people I've brought into my life. I always pick myself back up when I fall down, I always push through hurt and give it my all anyway. But somehow these things don't make me a good person inside. There's something else I'm not grasping, something that other people have that allows them to move mistake-free. Either that or my mistakes are so giant and obvious that other people's life-errors are insignificant in comparison.

Or it's all in my head, and I've driven myself crazy with guilt for all the years of not being the perfect friend, the perfect lover, the perfect daughter.

I just don't know. I'm tired of the roller coaster of emotion inside me. Am I worth all of this? It seems like at such a young age things should just be rolling off my back, but they don't. I cling to every little worry. I rip each one apart and open them up and stare at all those guts and I can't for the LIFE of me bring myself to throw them away. I consistently make myself physically ill over my guilt. The mind-numbing, never-ending guilt.

And I thought I was doing so well.

Ye Olde Chiropractic Assistant

Oh, the romance-related messes I get myself into. I'm amazed at my inherent ability to turn something good into something complicated at the drop of a hat. I would say I miss the old days where everything was simple, but those never actually happened. =) I give up. No more love for me.

On the plus side, training at the clinic has been a blast. My coworkers are all fantastic, our patients are lovely, the doctors are helpful, everything's beautiful and organized and easily accessible. Yesterday I developed a bunch of X-rays (which meant I got to peak at a woman's particularly nasty cervical subluxation-- yeowch!) and sat in on a few sessions just to take notes. I'm pledged for a year at least, but I don't think that'll be the least bit difficult to take; I'm so excited when I'm there I can barely stand still.