What a time. What a long lonely time. I never knew the days could stretch out so endlessly. Stretch so far I think they’ll break, but they only heave and sag. The weight of them bears down on me mercilessly. I wake … into another day of dread. Dread with no name or face. Nothing to fight with my body or wits. Just a gnawing gripping fear. So hard and heavy. I can’t breathe. I can’t swallow.


The emptiness of my depression turns to grief, then to numbness and back again. My world is filled with underwater voices, people, lists of things to do. They gurgle and dart in and out of my vision and reach. But they are so fast and slippery that I can never keep up. Every inch of me aches. I can’t believe that a person can hurt this bad and still breathe. All escapes are illusory—distractions, sleep, drugs, doctors, answers, hope…

you're perfect. be mine.

ah, the things we want to say but can't...

Some of the most wonderful people are the ones who don’t fit into boxes.

you: so thats it then kid?
me: what?
you: you're going to give up just like that?
me: i'm not giving up, im changing my expectations.
you: you told me that someday you want kids and a family
me: i did
you: well what changed?
me: me
you: i think you just took the easy option
me: sometimes the easy option is the right one
you: don't hide yourself away from the world
me: im not hiding, i'm just existing independently
you: like me then
me: i wouldn't want to be a freak like you though! lol
you: you're worse than me
me: whats worse than a cunt?
you: i jsut answered that, you!
me: i hate you on so many levels
you: you're too small to hate
me: guess you've never been to bed with a mosquito then

i love my friends :)

The problem with me is that as soon as I start thinking about getting it together, I get this mad craving desire to fuck it up.

I tried to understand the mystery of names by staring into the mirror and repeating mine over and over. Or the word 'me.' As if one could come into language as into a room. Lost in the blank, my obsessive detachment spiraled out into the unusable space of infinity, indifferent nakedness. I sat down in it. No balcony for clearer view, but I could focus on the silvered lack of substance or the syllables that correspond to it because all resonance grows from consent to emptiness. But maybe, in my craving for hinges, I confused identity with someone else.

who was it
who invented
size zero?

who was it
who promised
that if you got
to a certain point
you would no
longer
be?

Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.

Even now I prowl through people's houses. Arriving for a party, I hang my coat in the closet and glance at the shelf above the pole, wondering: what's in those boxes? Upstairs to wash my hands and look in the medicine cabinet. Dental floss and Jolen cream bleach for facial hair. A prescription for tetracycline, one for antifungal ointment. Nothing shameful- no Valium, Xanax, or worse, Prozac. These people aren't anxious or depressed. They have sinus infections and athlete's foot. They don't spend the minutes between waking and showering reciting reasons not to kill themselves.

I suspect that people from unhappy families are always searching the cupboards and drawers of happy people. Sliding a hand between the neat stacks of towels in the linen closet, slipping a finger under the hinged lid of a jewel box, flipping furtively through the pages of a book. They are looking everywhere. As if, perhaps, out might fall a list, an outline, the formula for how they do it.

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach.

The world you desire can be won. It exists... it is real... it is possible... it's yours.

For J

It's one of my closest friend's birthdays today. So i thought I'd share some poetry in his honour. I doubt he likes poetry, but it must be nice to know someone was thinking about you when they created something beautiful with letters. These are from a while back, but still they show I think, how much I care for him and hope he has an awesome day full of friends and happiness and love.


----



I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffling the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratúe.



------


I don’t just want
your heart
I want your flesh,
your skin
and blood and bones,
your voice, your thoughts
your pulse
and most of all your
fingerprints,
everywhere.


-------


Just when I had learned to be without,
it happened that I thought:
this person I won’t give up.


------

I wanted to write tonight about feelings. I'm beginning to feel things again. Before it was either the shrieking high of hysteria or glum melancholy of depression. Now it's not just black and white. I see shades of grey, occasionally tinged with gold. Emotions so delicate and frail that before I could never reach them. 


Lust, hope, wistfulness. 


They linger on my lips now. I delight in these new sensations. I feel myself welling up with feeling again, as if I have walked out of the blackest night into an autumn forest. The beauty of being human astounds me.


It's like learning a new language. The way you'd learn the curves of your lovers body. Enchanting. 

It is perhaps sad books that console us most when we are sad, and the pictures of lonely service stations that we should hang on our walls when there is no one to hold or love.

I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvellous that only the marvellous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvellous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

A message for myself when I need it the most

Dear B

I don't know when you'll need to read this, but one thing is for sure, there will be some point when you'll need to read it. At that point you'll be rock bottom and feel completely alone in this world. Well biatch, you ain't alone. Lets look at this factually, you have far too many friends to keep in touch with, let alone ever to be alone if you want to be. In fact sometimes it can be kind of annoying, because you hate saying "no", so you say "yes" and go along to things with your friends you never really wanted to do in the first place. But that's ok, because usually you have a great time. You have great friends. Choosing to spend less time with them and more time on your book and fitness is a conscious decision. And yeah, it will mean being alone more, but ultimately it will get you the future you want. Imagine that, a published author and military officer? It's worth it! In the end your dreams really can come true.

Now, I know what else you're thinking. You feel unloved. You feel like everyone else is in love and you're not, and it makes you sad because it brings back happy memories of the times you were in love. Well, thankfully you're NOT in love, because if you were you wouldn't want to join the military, you wouldn't want to be away from home for long periods of time, you'd just want to be with your boyfriend. Well screw that, you've done love too many times. You've given everything and got nothing back except a broken heart and broken promises. Fuck love. Maybe one day you will meet someone, or maybe you already met someone but the time just isn't right. You owe yourself a couple of years to sort your head out, pick your heart up and get your career sorted. Love just complicates things. Loneliness hurts sometimes, just like missing Dave hurts. But you owe it to yourself to conquer that. 

You've got everything to live for, your life is just getting started, you are going to change the world, you know you have it in you. Just don't give up.

Love B x

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved. 

Here I am, setting out on the first step to world domination - conquering myself.

My legs ache, my arms ache, my chest aches, my back aches - and it's only going to get worse :)

If the earth were only a few feet in diameter floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it marveling at its big pools of water, its little pools, and the water flowing between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of the ball and at the creatures in the water. The people would declare it sacred because it was the only one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt. The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to pray to it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty, and to wonder how it could be. People would love it and defend it with their lives because they would somehow know that their lives, their own roundness, could be nothing without it. If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter. 

Today I walked beside rivers and woodlands. And for once I looked around me and saw the world. Not just a distraction or a fleeting glance in my busy life, I took time to see what is missing, hidden, unless you take the time to look for it. 


Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers—for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.

When the last leave falls,
When the last drop of water dries out,
When the ozone layer is already destroyed,
Will it be too late to understand
that money is not going to save us?

I feel that now, miraculously, I have been granted a second chance to live. It was not the life I wanted or expected, but I understand that it was my duty now to live that life as richly and hopefully as I can. I vow to try. I will live with passion and curiosity. I will open myself to the possibilities of life. I will savour every moment, and I will try, every day, to become more human and more alive.


This is my promise that I make to me. 

They say life is a lesson and you learn it when you're through. Well, screw that. I want to learn it all right now. I want to know the answers before you even ask the question. Hell, I even want to be the one asking the questions. You get my point, I don't want my life to be at the mercy of anyone.


I have this desire to experience everything. And its something that won't be quelled. Again I return to the same idea, the RAF, seeing the world, learning how to fight a war, living with comrades and friends and experiencing the best that life has to offer. I've thought about it on an off for years, but cancer and then bipolar always got in the way.


If i can show i've beaten bipolar and had no episodes in 12 months then I can apply. That gives me the time to get fit, and really consider my options and if its right for me. Admittedly, even this decision to try means i'll pretty much be living at the gym, but so be it. I choose that route. I choose to make my body as strong as my mind. I choose blood and sweat over comfort and relaxation. Not because I don't want the latter more than the former, but because the latter is worth NOTHING without the former.


I don't want to watch the news any more. I want to be it.

its funny sometimes, the aftermath of a thought can be more powerful than the thought itself. it eats at you like a cancer. just a sly remark, a throw away comment, something so insidious and small that it slips through your defences and buries a hole so deep that you can't trace it. the thought remains, malign and misinformed, and just like fear breeds fear, one thought breeds another, until - BAM- there's an armada of those little fuckers making a beeline straight for your brain. 


how do you break the chain? how do you stop your conciousness accepting the raucous racket of discontentment and force it to focus instead on the serenity of happiness? what a strange thought, forced happiness; how often i have forced a smile onto my lips, forced a laugh even. anything to seem like them. because if you look like them, and act like them, they can't tell that on the inside you're not like them. they don't know you dream in blood and gunshots, they can't tell your deepest fantasy, they can't feel your malevolence towards them. 


all serial killers are brilliant actors. just like people with bipolar disorder, or the successful ones at least. its funny actually, the bipolar serial killers, well, their motivation wasn't to kill for the enjoyment of it like other kinds of serial killer. it was to project the image of yourself onto the victim and kill yourself, over and over, and over and over. because for someone with bipolar, there are times when to kill yourself once really doesn't give justice to the thoughts. its the only illness that makes you want to die twice. 


i've already killed my heart. that lump of tissue is diseased and vile. what's next? kill my sanity? and what after that? my body? by that point just a living shell for the person i once was.


thoughts are dangerous. at least to someone like me.

you: so you're saying you don't want a boyfriend again?


me: no, i'm saying I don't want anyone else to break their promises. i don't want anyone else to say they'll love me forever and then leave. i guess that i don't really trust anyone to not hurt me, because  everyone does.


you: have i hurt you?


me: well, no but it's not the same is it.


you: so not everyone hurts you then?


me: well you haven't hurt me yet.


you: what if i promise not to?


me: i don't know if i'd believe you.


you: do you ever think that by saying that you're hurting me?


me: why?


you: because i'm not just any other guy. i don't want you to lump me in the same box as them. they're idiots, because why would anyone who had you, ever want to let go? 


me: because i'm not worth hanging on to


you: no, it's because they didn't deserve you. if they can't appreciate who you are then thats their loss. you light up a room, i've never seen that with anyone but you, you're special, start believing it!!


*awkward silence as i don't know what to say*

I'm tired of looking for Romeo. He clearly took the wrong turning, stopped for a milkshake in someone else's yard or is sat crying into his live journal account.

Well a few words for Romeo -  You aren't worth the wait.

I never thought I was capable of being happy on my own. Once you let someone into your life and fill the space occupied by your shadow, when they're gone, well, there's just a shadow. Before the shadow was something you never noticed, now it becomes an empty place that nothing else can fill. The shadow doesn't ever go away, but the need to fill it does, and it happens quite unremarkably and unnoticed, an accumulation of days and weeks.

The good thing about growing stronger as a person is that you don't need anyone to reassure you. You realise that no-one on earth is qualified to judge you, and even if they tried you are intellectually capable of ripping them to pieces if you want to. 

It's funny because you realise that all the bad things that ever happened from you haven't detracted from your personality, they have just added to it.

I guess I'm finally starting to feel like I 'did it', meaning, I survived. And damn I've made it through so much - rape, cancer, suicide, bipolar. I am the strongest person I know, and the future is mine to create. 

I stopped looking for Romeo the second I found happiness within. I stopped needing to be more than I am. I don't need a guy to complete me any more, I need my friends to have fun with, I need my family to love, but no, I do not need Romeo.

Juliet seeks her Romeo

Juliet started a revolution. 

so this is what happens when you decide to actually help yourself.


you quit caffeine, you start eating the right things, you drink nothing but water and fruit juice. for a while it's hell, everything they said it should be- headaches, nausea, exhaustion - but after the crappiness comes the good bit, actually feeling alive in your own skin. 


i've not felt this good in so long. i don't just mean psychologically, but physically, i feel like i'm getting healthy, waking from a living nightmare or something. now i can finally be me.

I’m living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there’s a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.

So, I met this guy. And not just any guy, but the kind of guy who opens doors for you. 

You know there are some people in this world, the really special ones, who make time pass by so fast an hour with them feels like a second? Well, he's one of those guys. One of the people you know is on your side, and i'm glad to have him on mine.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.


I have my idea. Now to make my place in the library.

my weekend began at 5pm on friday night when i finished work. coming out of the office i remember it being dark and kind of icy, the sort of cold that hits you soon as you walk out of the building, and you kick yourself for wearing those silly ballet pumps and that low cut top which seemed a good idea at the time- the time being when you were stood next to the heater all cosy in your PJ's at 7am. and well, just to clarify about the top, it wasn't THAT low cut, just low cut enough so the boy you like notices that you actually have breasts, but without looking overly slutty! 

friday night was a bit of a rush, by the time i get in after the nightly queuing in traffic an hour has already pased. i resent the fact that i spend 2 hours a day in traffic every day, that's 10 a week, 40 a month. i can think of much more useful things to do with my time, namely masturbation, or failing that book research. but it can be nice sometimes, throwing a CD in and drifting off somewhere else. i usually follow the mood of the CD, and a lot of the time it brings me back to dave, whenever i hear about love he's always the one i think of. its dangerous where the thoughts can lead from their, and sometimes i sink into the familiarity of my downward spiral and arrive home with my face wet from tears, hands shaking from holding the wheel so tight, like i was holding on to him or something. usually if i get home like that i go straight to my room and lie in the darkness on my back, head sunk into a pillow, sobbing for a while. i say a while, because laying on my back really hurts my boobs after a bit. almost like my own body is rebelling against my misery...or that i just have big tits.. lol

Funny.

I understand killers better than lovers.

I wonder why I haven't killed before, when so many killers childhood's looked just like mine.

At the end of the day faith is a funny thing. It turns up when you don’t really expect it. It’s like one day you realize that the fairy tale may be slightly different than you dreamed. The castle, well, it may not be a castle. And it’s not so important that it’s happy ever after, just that it’s happy right now. See, once in a while, once in a blue moon, people will surprise you, and once in a while people may even take your breath away

All my life I have written, much more than I’ve ever shown anyone, most of which I’ve thrown out. All my life I had to: simple. Possibly the only thing in my life which has ever been simple, this draw to put things in words. The one thing about me worth envying …

It is not pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to the ravages of an almost daily rain, and to know that you are turning into something feeble, that more and more of you will blow off with the first strong wind, making you less and less. Some people accumulate more emotional rust than others. Depression starts out insipid, fogs the days into a dull color, weakens ordinary actions until their clear shapes are obscured by the effort they require, leaves you tired and bored and self-obsessed—but you can get through all that. Not happily, perhaps, but you can get through. No one has ever been able to define the collapse point that marks major depression, but when you get there, there’s not much mistaking it. Major depression is a birth and a death: it is both the new presence of something and the total disappearance of something.

It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression…in the end I was compacted and foetal, depleted by this thing that was crushing me without holding me. Its tendrils threatened to pulverise my mind and my courage and my stomach, and crack my bones and desiccate my body. It went on glutting itself on me when there seemed nothing left to feed it. …I knew then that I could never kill this vine of depression, and so all I wanted was for it to let me die. But it had taken from me the energy I would have needed to kill myself, and it would not kill me. If my trunk was rotting, this thing that fed on it was now too strong to let it fall ; it had become an alternative support to what it had destroyed. In the tightest corner of my bed, split and racked by this thing no one else seemed to be able to see, I prayed to a God I had never entirely believed in. I would have been happy to die the most painful death, though I was too dumbly lethargic even to conceptualize suicide. Every second of being alive hurts me.

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?

D

I hope you're worth it.

B x

it feels like bliss
slitting your wrists.

I hate to admit it, but I really don’t believe in the afterlife. I still think that human beings, even our beautiful and wretched souls, are just biology, are just a series of chemical and physical reactions that one day stop, and so do we, and that is that. But I’m looking forward to this blank peace, this oblivion, this nothing, this not being me anymore.

It’s a physical urge, huger and stronger than thirst or sex. Halfway back on the left side of my head there is a spot that yearns, that longs, that pleads for the jolt of a bullet. I want that rage, that fire, that final empty rip. I want to be let out of this dark cavern, to open myself up to the ease of not-living. I am tired of sorrow and struggle and worry. ... I want to turn out the last light. 

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that. 

You know you've got issues when your blog has 18 posts about suicide, 25 posts about depression and only 4 about happiness.


And you know you're screwed when you read the 4 posts about happiness, and they're all about the boy who left you.

It’s strange, the layers of misery that there are. You get used to feeling pretty miserable most of the time—what might be called “low-level misery”—a sort of permanent background of misery, and you learn to cope with it; it almost gets to feel normal. But then something happens...which reminds you of what it was like not to feel miserable, and it hurts so much you almost just can’t bear it.

ever feel so empty that you're bottomless?

last night

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.