some day i'll be dignified.
today is not that day.

i feel all out of wack, like my internal clock gave up the ghost and is sat their twitching like a dead rat waiting for a battery change. it's 3.45am, and i've slept from 6pm till 2am, missing swimming, planned night of TV with my mum and the chance to talk to K that i'd been waiting for all day.


the thing is, and i've thought long and hard about it. i don't actually want a boyfriend, or at least to say - i don't want K. my friends tell me that i should meet him and see what he's like in person, but mentally i know i'm not ready. i'm still in lust with C. i'm enjoying the head games we play with each other. it's like playing cat and mouse with something neither of us can have. we couldn't work as a couple, this much is obvious to us both, but the hopeless futility of it makes the chase more appealing.


i hope he will kiss me and see how important i am.

love

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

just me.

Ah, what difference a week makes. It's nice to write a normal entry here for a change instead of something I have to drag up from the depths of my soul. Luckily i'm not all intensity and bleakness and occasionally even a smile escapes my lips.

This week can only be described as incredible. Madness. But a beautiful, intense, thrilling madness that makes my gut tingle with anticipation. This was the week I discovered Henry Miller, 500 days of summer, The Smiths, Florence and the Machine, The Kinks, Black Books and An Idiot Abroad. It was also the week I got to know a really nice guy who can only be described as everything a girl should want - kind, good job, funny, cute. Maybe this is my lucky week. Maybe everything is slotting together and fitting into place at last...

Why one writes is a question I can easily answer, having so often asked it myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me—the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own like a climate, a country, an atmosphere where I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That I believe is reason of every work of art. We also write to heighten our awareness of life. We write to lure, enchant, and to console others. We write to serenade. We write to taste life twice, once in the moment and once in retrospection. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak to others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled or restricted or lonely. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.

I’m getting less good at faking it. People in my family are noticing and asking what’s wrong. My friends give me invitations to talk, to cry. I love them for their caring, but I want to run from it. I have lost their language, their facility with words that convey feelings. I am in new territory and feel like a foreigner in theirs.

This week ticks by so slowly. The drib drab of another day seeping through the sand timer, and what do I get in return? A few more words written on a virtual page, tucked away in an obscure corner of the internet.

I wonder when did words stop being enough? I wonder how words were ever enough in the first place. As if symbols on a page could ever hope to make up for a reality at odds with everything i am.

I dont want to JUST write anymore. I don't want to JUST do anything. I want to eat all corners of the cake. I want the whole thing for myself, not just the corner labelled "writer". I don't want my destiny at the exclusion of everything else life has to offer:

sex, drugs, fire, passion, love, career, friends, family, music, art, literature, property, piercings, travel, experiences.

Funny really, how wanting everthing is the closest thing to wanting nothing.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. 
You leave the same impression 
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

I feel myself getting smaller and smaller. More and more disposable. How long will it be before I disappear altogether?

My world falls apart, crumbles, The center cannot hold. There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom—I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go.

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time..

I'm writing this on my lunch at work. In the background people are talking and I can hear the ping of a microwave. It's hard making my thoughts solid enough to actualise in words. I feel like i'm on the cusp of discovering some great truth, somthing poigniant enough to give me the meaning i've been looking for. But like a butterfly it flutters incoherently beyond my reach and I am left stumbling after it. Transfixed by the beauty of something I can never possess, irides scorched by the brightness of the headlights as actualisation threatens to encompass me and then moves swiftly by into the night.

its funny, because at the back of my mind i already knew the test results before they came back. i've felt it all before, the ache of my swollen glands, the bruising around my joints, the exhaustion, losing weight. so to say it's a surprise is a lie. 

i want to push back the layers of my skin, rip it apart, reach inside of me, and tear out the part that is destroying me.

i don't want to die.

the funny thing is, when i found out i might be sick again, there was only one person i wanted to give me a cuddle. and he can't. he never can :(

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

Why? You want to know why?

Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight.

Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all, "a disappointment." Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and drink and cut because you need the anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's too late because you are mainlining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop.

Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat scream that everysinglething is wrong with you.

"Why?" is the wrong question.

Ask "Why not?"

He smiled understandingly- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

In life we're all born with a hand of cards. Some people are lucky and get the Ace's, King's and Queens - others have nothing more than 2's and 3's, but most of us - the vast majority - have a mixture. For us people, the masses as the bourgeois would call us, we need to learn how to play the game. We can rise and we can fall. Play the right cards at the right time and genius is tangible, yet so fragile. 


Life is a game of cards. but what if i don't want to play your card game anymore.What if i dont like the rules? What if I want to make my own game, with my own rules and just play by myself? Hell, what if i don't even like cards?


Life is like a game of cards - but what happens if we cheat? 

In bed this morning
you tucked into the cove of my belly
our feet slipping past each other like fish
I reached out to embrace
the flat rock of your back
and carved out our names
with my tongue 

if there is such a thing as a guardian angel. i need mine, now, please.

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.

You are closed and shuttered to me now, a room without doors or windows, and I cannot enter. But I fell in love with you under the open sky and death cannot change that.

Death can change the body but not the heart.

We are an ignorant, apathetic nation of losers. We have more opportunities than ever before. What has all of the hard learned lessons brought us? We're fatter, lazier, and stupider than ever. THESE are the Dark Ages.

We have reality shows so we can experience life without having to put down our Big Macs.

Books are made into movies, shortened for our commercial attention spans.

Pop stars (no longer can most be rightfully called musicians) rewrite the same drivel to a different computer generated beat.

In a few years, the pre-teens of today, whose heroes are rappers and the mindless elite, will be able to vote.Who cares about Iraq, North Korea, or any of those unpronounceable countries somewhere on the other side of the globe. What's Britney doing today? Did you hear about Lindsey Lohan getting out of rehab?

Why should I vote? My neighbor will do it. My one vote won't count. And I may miss (insert popular tv show for this month here).

I don't even have to leave home to buy groceries any longer. Everything can be delivered and paid for with credit. Paper money and credit cards will never lose their value, right?

What's a library?

Who is Winston Churchill?

Wasn't Marie Curie that alien on Spooks last season?

My brain is screaming with the influx of ignorance around me. Should I give in and join the drooling throngs of Westernised culture?

Do they give lobotomies on request?

Is there a secret place out there, a paradise, that Thinkers have found? When will I be notified? How do I get there? I need to escape from this society before I rip out my brain (or someone else's). I long for intelligent debates, real conversation, art, literature, everything that redeems humanity, and proves that we're better than dumb animals. Passion, creativity, they give life meaning.

Why do people work as little as they can for as much as they can steal? What has happened to us? You are not entitled because you are you. Stop whimpering about your life if you are not going to change. More, more, more. Greed, greed, greed. Work hard. Do more than expected. Help your fellow man experience life!

There is so much out there! I long to see and do it all. Life can be amazing, but not from a recliner. You can not have a fulfilling life in front of the tv or a cell phone. Turn off the technology that is keeping us apart. Get out there and socialize. Learn about others, care about others, and your life will improve dramatically!

Take an hour a week and turn off the fucking tv! Invite your neighbor for a walk. Take cookies to the old man down the street (cliche', I know), volunteer, help out a colleague. Do something for someone else.

I want to see if my faith in humanity can be restored, or if I should just pull the trigger.

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing heat beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

Like most of the others I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other- that kept me going.

it's nice to feel hopeful, i've got that 1945 feeling, the war is ending, the enemy is backed into its last corner. dawn is breaking.

my heart is beginning to unfreeze.

i'm not scared anymore. i want to go out into the world and make it drum to my beat. no more following. no more running away. time to face my future. time to make my place in the world. my own unique, quirky place.

i'm not like all the other girls. i don't care about make up and the right boy. i just want to be me, no more putting myself on ice for anyone. no more waiting for a dream of someone who never really wanted me anyway. i'm alive right now, and i owe it to myself to live for the moment. taste the freedom.