dave.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZtS6idkym0

emptiness is loneliness.
and loneliness is godliness.
and godliness is cleanliness.
and god is empty jsut like me.

i used to be a lot of trouble, a serious "problem child". i had problems because i was both ignorant and passionate. i was on fire and i let it show, and during the periods of my worst excesses, i used to say to myself, take it all the way, take it too far. if you push yourself over the edge, things will turn out alright.

i might be doing something like burshing my teeth and suddenly feel asthough i just wanted to die right then, and then, as if my life depended on it, i would try to get in touch with all my friends from my past. i often focussed a lot of my energy on planning my death, but i always concluded the desire to die was just an urge like any other. like a common cold, it would come and go.

what would happen to my parents if i died? whenever i thoguht abotu this, i abandoned my plans. in the past i'd never so much as considered other peoples feelings. love is something that has to be learned.

i am someone who sees herself as a problem. for me writing is a method of transforming corruption and decay into something wonderful and miraculous. i used to be the sort of person who was always on the look out for excitement and novelty, but now i've somewhat come to sense that if any marvels are going to appear in my life, they will undoubtedly spring from the act of writing. actually, the prospect of marvels doesnt really excite me anymore. i feel that writing is the only thing that has meaning for me ( lately ive been playing that depressing game of "what is the meaning of life?" yet again).

poem

please believe me,
the little scream told me,
it wanted to hold me, hold me so tenderly,
floating free,
falling free,
and the stream rushes on, never stopping,
underwater, i'll breathe in that stream, until the end of life.
only the stream, knows how it will happen.
please believe me,
if you dont need me anymore,
i'll be gone soon,
i promise you, promise
i'll drown my body in wine.

sometimes

sometimes i need to leave the surfece of the earth.; sometimes i need to be full of love for the entire world, i need some ecstacy; sometimes i need to nourish my brain. theres nothing else but me and the starry sky, and the moon looks like a childs face, i don't dare smile at it. it seems as if maybe i'm a child too. children are the true observers in this world.

psych ward, aged 19

with shaking hands, i carefully unscrewed the bare light bulb hanging in my room and smashed it to the floor. carefully, i picked up the tiny glass shards and swallowed them down with a glass of water. i expected to feel intense pain, but i didn't, and instead i was swamped with a sense of relief. i'd needed to slash my arms, but, locked in the bare room of a psychiatric unit without even a hairbrush, the light bulb was the only way i could hurt myself.

rock bottom

rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...
rock bottom is feeling like the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment...
rock bottom is everything out of focus. it's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way.

sometimes i wish i could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead. sometimes i wish that there were a way to let people know that just because i live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after. sometimes i think that i was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest i could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left.

the first cut is the deepest.

i guess the cutting began when i started to spend my lunch period hiding in the girls' locker room, scared to death of everybody around me. i would bring my CD player and listen to the scratchy sounds of the finger marked CD's that i'd accumulated, mostly popular hard rock like Foreigner, which, trashy as it was, sounded like liberation to me. I'd sit there with my CD's, eating cottage cheese and pineapples from a stout thermos I brought from home (i was, by this time, also certain that i was fat), and it was a peaceful relief from having to deal with other people, whether they were teachers or friends.

at school every so often, i would sit in the locker room on the floor, leaning against the concrete wall while my CD player sat on the bench, and I would fantasize about going back to the person I had been before. the reverse transformation couldn't be that much of a leap. i could just try talking to people again. i could get the astonished look off my face, as if my eyes had just been exposed to a terrible glare. i could laugh a bit.

i would imagine myself doing the things i once did, like playing tennis. every so often i would make a decision, first thing in the morning as I headed out the door for the school bus, that I was going to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that day; i would be friendly, i would smile, i would raise my hand in maths class from time to time. i remember those days, because i could see how my friends got this look of relief on their faces. i would walk toward them, standing in a huddle in the blue-carpeted hall outside of the classroom, and they would half expect me to say something like 'everything's plastic, we're all gonna die' and instead i would just say, "good morning". suddenly, their bodies would relax, their shoulders would drop comfortably, and sometimes they would even say "oh wow, you're the old Bev again" kind of like a parent who has finally accepted that his oldest son has become a Shiite Muslim and is moving to Iran when, suddenly, the kid returns home and announces that he wants to go to law school after all. my friends, and my mother for that matter, would be relieved to find that I was more the me they wanted me to be.

the trouble was, i thought this alternative persona i had adopted was just that: a put-on, a way of getting attention, a way of being different. and maybe when I first started walking around talking about plastic and death, maybe then it was an experiment. but after a while, the alternative me really just was me. those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. i went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I'd been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions i couldn't quite answer any longer.

i remember being in a panic one day at school when I realized that I could not even fake being the old Bev anymore. i had, indeed, metamorphosed into this nihilistic, unhappy girl. just like Gregor Samsa waking up to find he'd become a six foot long roach, only in my case, i had invented the monster and now it was overtaking me. this was what i'd come to. this was what i'd be for the rest of my life. things were bad now and would get worse later. they would. i had not heard the word depression yet, and would not for some time after that, but i felt something very wrong going on. i felt that i was wrong - my hair was wrong, my face was wrong, my personality was wrong - my god, my choice of flavors at the Haagan Dazs shop after school was wrong! how could I walk around with such pasty white skin, such dark, doleful eyes, such straight anemic hair, such round hips and such a small clinched waist? how could I let anybody see me this way? how could I expose other people to my person, to this bane to the world? i was one big mistake.

and so, sitting in the locker room, petrified that i was doomed to spend my life hiding from people this way, i took my keys out of my knapsack. on the chain was a sharp nail clipper, which had a nail file attached to it. i rolled down my knee socks (we were required to wear skirts to school) and looked at my bare white legs. i hadn't really started shaving yet, only from time to time because my mother considered me too young, and i looked at the delicate peach fuzz, still soft and untainted. a perfect, clean canvas. so I took the nail file, found its sharp edge, and ran it across my lower leg, watching a red line of blood appear across my skin. i was surprised at how straight the line was and at how easy it was for me to hurt myself in this way. it was almost fun. i was always the sort to pick scabs and peel sunburned skin in sheets off my shoulders, always pestering my body. this was just the next step. and how much more satisfying it was to muck up my own body than relying on mosquitoes and walks in the country among thorny bushes to do it for me. i made a few more scratches, alternating between legs, this time moving the file more quickly, less cautiously.

i did not, you see, want to kill myself. not at that time, anyway. but I wanted to know that if need be, if the desperation got so terribly bad, i could inflict harm on my body. and i could. knowing this gave me a sense of peace and power, so i started cutting up my legs all the time. hiding the scars from my mother became a sport of its own. i collected razor blades, i bought a Swiss Army knife, i became fascinated with different kinds of sharp edges and the different cutting sensations they produced. i tried out different shapes - squares, triangles, pentagons, even an awkwardly carved heart, with a stab wound at its center, wanting to see if it hurt the way a real broken heart could hurt. i was amazed and pleased to find that it didn't.

am i the only one who is afraid that when i go to hell there will be no films to watch, no comfortable pajamas to wear, no heavenly sounds of records to be heard- just suffocating boredom?

my life. my limit.

i see the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another is sleep, like a black shade. only for me, the long perspective of shades that sets off one box from the next day has suddenly snapped up, and i can see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

limited

i can never read all the books i want; i can never be all the people i want and live all the lives i want. i can never train myself in all the skills i want. and why do i want? i want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. and i am horribly limited.