It consumes me, my isolation. It’s remarkable that I am surrounded by people, drowning in countless throngs of the faces of my many acquaintances, yet I feel wholly alone. I have my family by my side, more of them than usual, mind you, but we don’t really talk; we bullshit about the weather and watch movie after movie to strangle the silence between us, careful to not impose on one another with anything weighty. Nathaniel is where he always is when my spirits sour: he’s at a movie, at a concert, chipping away at an unnecessary 80-hour work week, waiting from a distance for me to cheer up and act normal. He comes home hours after I’ve gone to bed and leaves before I wake. In his absence my depression spirals, my perspective throbs and distorts and I fall deeper into dysfunction, and I hate myself for needing him the way that I do.

Elisse lied almost as compulsively and erratically as I do, and for the same reasons: in an attempt to pacify great expectations, to out-wit and out-run the judgments of others, to forge some semblance of privacy between us and the peering, disapproving gaze of the world around us. I wasn’t at the store today: I went to the park, but I told you otherwise because I hate that you need to know. I hate that you ask about the things that don’t matter and blatantly ignore the things that do.

Elisse and I are very similar in that respect: if you inspect the details, the technical mechanics of our stories, you’ll find them to be comically, absurdly untrue. Elisse, however, would always tell the truth about the things that matter. The arching themes- the method, the incentive, the foundational elements capable of explaining every subsequent minutia- were always offered without question. She felt too deeply to lie about what she felt, and she was wise enough to see the folly and the danger of trying to hide it. Thus she wore her soul on her sleeve, bravely and unconditionally.

When things were going well for me I saw this as a weakness and an imposition. When things were going badly I fled to her, frantically, as fast as my hypocrite legs would take me, to bask in her emotional candor and understanding. She had her insecurities- in hindsight I suspect they ran deeper than I realized- but she never apologized for being an emotional being.

She was too much in love with life to lie about the bittersweet thrill of it all. She was salvation and relief, and people gravitated towards her. We need to be honest, we need to accept what is, we need to admit to our demons in order to face them. We feel alone, we feel unworthy, we feel defective, we live life convinced of our inability and insanity, yet we spend almost every precious minute and ounce of energy convincing each other we’re normal and happy.

I am not happy. I don’t want to talk about the weather. I want to fall to my knees and beat my fists upon the ground, crying and sobbing and shrieking myself hoarse, ripping at my clothes, writhing and convulsing in the agony of all this mysterious, inexplicable, unjustified misery. I want to look in your eyes and say something worthy of the explosive existence we share on this earth. I want to discuss something that tries to do justice to the sky, or the snow, or the heart-wrenchingly beautiful concepts of family or friendship or love. I want to love you with the very sinew of my muscle and my being, without condition, without choice. When our mighty cities crumble and my carefully constructed world falls to shit, I want to turn my head and find you there unfaltering. We will mourn our losses, with time laugh at the dark irony of all the ugliness, and then, when the time comes, together we will rebuild whatever it was we let slip through our fingers.

I feel myself growing older. For some reason in my mind I have an image of shattering glass playing in reverse; millions of shards fly through the abyss to gradually complete a whole, unblemished, crystalline surface. Each day brings me new slivers of perspective and another day lived, and every once in a while I can feel how different my thoughts are from what they used to be. I don’t feel brilliant or wise or even less stupid, I just feel… older.

I’m not angry about certain things. I feel a reflexive impulse to open the gates, to let frustration billow and swell and muffle my good mood, to fire up and rage before slipping away to die. I open myself to these feelings, but the anger doesn’t come. I understand now, why people do some of the things they do. I understand that others are just as fragile and defensive and irrational as I. Everyone has their childhood issues, their insecurities, desperate desires stubbornly out of reach and coping mechanisms to accept them.

We’ve always been children, you and I. We fought so hard to prove to the world otherwise and god, how we wasted our time! What were we racing towards, what was the rush? Why did we run so frantically from the sweet carelessness of our youth? We cared so deeply, so desperately about so many of the wrong things. How silly those things seem from a distance! Why did we let them enrage us?

It’s all a dull throb now, those silly little things that once meant everything. I see reasons all around me to get upset but they mean nothing. There’s so much more to all of this than the slights, the injustices, the nagging thoughts of mediocrity and inability and insignificance. We stand beloved, just as we always have, just as we always will. Joy flashes through my limbs: we’re conquering our sadness, my love! The things that once consumed us stand powerless! I want to thrust out my arms and rejoice, I want to run in the grass and the sun towards the future and endless oblivion. I want to grab your hand and face the world, and with your hand in mine walk forward.

But you are elsewhere now, I know. You are with me but in a different way. You are the ink on my skin, the salt of memory-born tears, the wisp of tobacco smoke that encircled you as you embraced a lucky strike in the snow. Slowly, with each passing day, I come closer to accepting this.

I talk to you, you know. Like a lunatic I look up to the sky and chuckle about all the things you’d find funny. I roll my eyes and mutter to you throughout the day, convinced I can gauge your reaction to a tee. But there are things I don’t know about you, darling. There are things we hid from each other out of pride and distrust, all the while convinced we knew everything worth knowing about the other. We were blinded by how well we thought we knew each other; in some regards we were almost strangers.

That’s another thing each day gives me: scraps of truth that reveal how little I know and how tremendously little I knew yesterday. I suppose that’s all I have to say for now. Life is ironic in the blackest yet sweetest way possible, simultaneously falling in and out of focus, beating in rhythm to steps on the sidewalk, mellifluous, muted and miles above our control.

I'm sitting in a small coffee shop in Northside, a small hip little community north-west of Cincinnati proper. I'm waiting on my beloved, Nathaniel, while he gets his hair cut, pretending to get some work done. I have work I'm currently neglecting, of course, there's always, always a soul-destroying pile of work I should be tending to, regardless the time of the year or the time of the day. No matter how hard I work I know I should always be working harder, and it's a bit difficult to keep spirits up in light of it all.

I'm glad to find myself writing, though. Now that I have everything I "want"- a wonderful, handsome, loyal boyfriend, a career and a passion I'm quite good at, a group of friends I go out with often, a charming apartment- I'm utterly restless and discontent. With the exception of Nate and at times design, everything seems trivial, superficial and meaningless.

Bah. I feel restless. I always feel restless, though. What a petty little wretch I am.

Bryan, darling, you are very much a part of me. I cannot remove your influence or the part you took in shaping me- we grew together during the time we spent together- and I would never want to. I see you reflected in every aspect of my personality, of my lifestyle, of my decisions; if my life were a pond I feel you'd be one of the few trees sitting beside and floating above, forever lending your visage to the surface of the water. So many things that I prefer and adore and cannot live without were things I found only by your introduction, and in turn I simply cannot live without you. You and I were once lovers. I mean this in a way that surpasses any single dimension or type of relationship: we were once lovers, we are now dear friends, colleagues, peers; we have become each other's family. I am no more capable of lessening your importance in my life than a tree is capable of changing it's grain or removing one of its rings. I couldn't be happier with this; despite any nativity shenanigans you decide to orchestrate, I will always respect and admire your integrity, dignity, and honesty. I will forever hold you in my memories and in my mind. You are so very dear to my heart, darling, and regardless of where life may take us, what lovers we take on, what changes befall us, or what distance lies between us, dear to my heart you shall stay. 

TO DO:

-find Karen Dalton's "It's so hard to tell who's going to love you the best" album.

-check out Mara Carlyle

Beautifully, refreshingly, freely, fabulously drunk. Listening to some of Nikka Costa’s better stuff, with Nicole Atkins and Meiko sprinkled pleasantly in between.

Currently finished with Ben, starting- for reasons unbeknownst to myself- something with an old Whirlpool coworker, still currently infatuated with Matt, it seems. That damn boy calls me out of the blue, sending my heart a flutter, sending me straight back to July, the bastard. I swear he collects the women he’s refused as friends.

All of these things, however, are a harmless, amusing blur once I’ve gotten a couple in me. I’m drowning myself in good whiskey and good music, floating back and forth to the kitchen for refills, utterly content. I’m only moderately annoyed with Matt. I’m only slightly confused with others. Everything is so benign in this state. Everything.

I don’t think I should settle. My chances of ending up happy would skyrocket if I did, but I don’t think I will. I’ll resign myself to something passionate; someone like Matt.  I’ll follow passion and be miserable and frustrated, but I’ll be passionate all the same. I want someone without whom I cannot breathe, without whom I cannot sleep, without whom I cannot be happy, whose very presence robs me of my independence and ability to live without them. I want to drink them in the way I do my whiskey, and I want to feel as distant and content and scandalously edified as a result. I want to fret over him the way most girls fret over their men; I want to give a shit for once. I want to be swept off my feet, I want to be changed by his very existence, I want to change drastically enough to be surprised and resent him for it.

I’ll have that or nothing, I’ve decided. I’ll putz about in the meantime, sure, but ultimately, if a man doesn’t make me feel the way I just described then I’ll carry on by myself. 

I walked through the lobby of the paltry hotel, weaving through furniture decades past its prime and tasteless holiday décor hung sloppily and thoughtlessly, looking left to right for sign of the ladies’ restroom. It was remarkable, I noted as my eyes glided over the sorry sight, what a couple of drinks does to the look of the place.

I trotted down a winding hallway to the bathroom, pleasantly surprised by the warmth of the facilities. I was feeling merry; I had just completed my last day of my internship for Whirlpool and tonight was my last night in St Joseph. I was celebrating with an unusually boisterous and intoxicated happy hour. I was half way through my third drink of the evening at this point in time, and though not drunk I was definitely good and tipsy.

I don’t know why I behave in a way so unfitting for the person I wish to be. I don’t know why I enable a perception of myself that solicits such crushing, demeaning judgment. I don’t want to be seen this way; I don’t want to be this way. I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly what I wish to be, though I have those lofty, general descriptors everyone would claim to strive towards: honest, hardworking, respectable. What I want specifically still manages to elude me. There have been situations that have occurred, much to my dismay, more and more often as of late, that alert me to exactly the things I do not wish to be.

I’ve discovered that I crave attention. Perhaps I don’t crave it, per say, but I enjoy it too much to ever turn it down, no matter how inappropriate, or unrespectable, or harmful to individuals I care about and respect. I behave without integrity because I am simply too apathetic to proactively dissuade attention I should consider myself above.

I can play this game. I’m articulate and persuasive enough to rationalize and justify anything to myself. I can dress this up as some sort of ironically poetic disorder, some sort of holy apathy instilled by my elite cynicism or disconnection or intellect.

There is nothing elite about the way I act during these times. If anything, it is a trait shared amongst many types of women I hate so fervently: deep down, something base and disgusting about me loves the flattery.