sniffy

Bathtubs are never clean, never. Scrub, I scrub for hours and there is still the sliver of slime clinging to the faucet that I cannot get to, but I try.
Inhale... the noxious bleach fumes. Expel... the co2 of eroding and inflamed lungs. This is why I clean.
All air outlets are closed off in order that all scents might combine into something glodorious. I am happy, yes I am happy, as I sniff enough to snuff myself out.

“Under there! It’s back there,” Bryan pointed to the small piece of ground carved out underneath the portables.
“Here?” A nod from Bryan led the after-school counselor’s hand underneath the building and into the dried rocky earth. From there he pulled out a box of candy bars, twenty-nine in all, with white and gold wrappers. One had gone missing.
“Did you take these?” He stared at me while I looked on stunned that there had even been a box of bars under there.
I nodded no and in a fit of pure confusion looked back and forth, back and forth, from Bryan back to the box. He was smiling.
“It was him! It was him!” I screamed. “Look, he’s smiling, he thinks it’s funny!”
“Who would believe a little fatty like you?” He giggled.
And I fell in my little black skorts and cried on the asphalt next to the portable and skinned my knee.

This was neither the beginning, nor the end of my disputes with the fifth grade bully and later his little sister Yvette, but it was the first time I really remember being a fatty. I had wished then that I could have stolen the candy bars because all I wanted was force the long smooth pieces of chocolate down his pale throat and watch him choke.


That's going to be the beginning of one of my chapters, because my weight has been an overwhelming factor in the way I've lived my life. Today, as everyday when I wake up, I was reminded that if only I could scoop out, like tallow, the viscous fat that hides who I really am then I could be a better person.
I was reminded that every other girl has much more to offer than me.
I can't recall a time when I wasn't completely overwhelmed by how underwhelmed people are in my presence. Of course, I have been recently reminded of both my lacking and my overabundance and this awareness has caused me to feel the need to go back to the gym, which is in essence a healthy thing. It's healthy except for that I haven't been much in the way of eating while going and so am fishtailing into some empty,lethargic, grumpy fool. I can feel that my body is hungry, but my soul doesn't want me to eat things and when I do it is angry.
I got my hair done, bought more makeup, some contacts in hopes that these small things could make the beauty that I want to be. It is not working. Not a surprise, but at least I don't have split ends.

Yesterday

I have the habit of reopening old wounds when I’m trying to close them and then opening new ones so the scars never heal over. I am left open and sore with dirty bandages hanging loose around me.
Yesterday was one of those days when things fell apart. In knowing that things will be better soon I made it through, but… again was caught off guard. My nerves were frazzled yesterday in preparation for the dress rehearsal for the play. My stomach failed and my heart was in my ears reminding me that good enough was all I needed to get through it.
Then I got a message from my friend with unexpected news that became the tipping point of my day; news that on any other day would have been mostly shrugged off to indifference, but yesterday compounded with the rest of my emotions, floored me again.
I left work early, not because I needed to be alone, but due to a prescheduled seclusion before the evening.
The bus came straight away and I was glad for it because my eyes were hard to keep dry. I was trying to figure what it was that I was actually crying about, but the confusion was making it worse. Was it the play? The information? The year anniversary?
I thought home would comfort me, but home was worse. I got home and couldn’t remember the reasons why I had even tried again. Wondered at why a life not so bad could feel so hard and then looked for the bottle of rubbing alcohol.
Bathroom cabinet? No.
Beneath the bed? No.
CJ’s bathroom? Check.
Cotton Swabs – found.
Razor blade – which one to choose?
And this is where it began.

“Nicole, do not do this, what are you doing?”
“No, it’s fine if it’s just this time, right? I just need to feel better before the play.”
“This won’t make you feel better.”
“It will for a minute.”
“Think of your mother.”
“I did and she’ll never know.”
“Fine then,” and I swabbed the razor blade with alcohol so that it would be clean and the metal would not infect me as it broke my skin.

I turned Coldplay’s Viva La Vida on.
Then I cut.
It wasn’t deep and it wasn’t like it used to be, but it was soothing to see the tiny ripples of blood and the little marks that I had made.
I stopped after only a few tiny ones because I realized my mistake.
I asked God for guidance and found a picture of my mom. I imagined the phone calls she used to make when she said, “girl, you’re not hurting yourself anymore right? Because I love you.”
I remembered why I had stopped and why this wasn’t the way I should cope and told myself to get out, “get the fuck out of this house you fool,” because if I had stayed I wouldn’t have had the willpower not to.
Packed my bags for the play, picked out my clothes for the stage, and proceeded to shut myself off from my old foolish ways.

Shaken

Rehearsal almost broke me.
Rachael and I were working on the scene where I finally break up with her and I began to shake and shiver and sob. It was the first time in a year that I let someone see me that way, vulnerable and scared. I was scared of feeling something I was unprepared for. When I am purposefully entering a territory that I know will cause some kind of reaction from me then I feel more in control and will allow the emotion, but the hurt that this scene elicited caught me off guard. In front of Ty and Rachael I cried and then attempted to pretend that everything was okay, that I wasn't really feeling anything and that we should go on.
"What are you remembering?" asked Ty.
"I don't know, I just don't know." (Long pause, hard stares) "I guess that this is the way we broke up, it's kind of the same thing and I'm reliving it in a play." There were try-to-hugs and consolations moments later, then words like, "time dear, time. you can use this for the scene. let it out." I went home exhausted.

At work the next day I was a motley of emotions and unsure what to do. I knew that it wasn't just the breakup that was getting to me, it was the election, the stress of the play, my relationship befuddlement compounded into an upset like Seattle felt when the Seahawks lost the superbowl.
The trigger: The week before the end of our relationship
Why: This is exactly one year ago since then
What: Her mother called me a nigger. Her mother said I was a manipulative bitch. Her mother never once said one good thing about me except to tell her daughter that I am prettier than her. Her mother is the most hateful person I've ever met and I let her daughter get away with a lot of things because of this fact.
"Oh, she's just this way because of her mother so I'll just let this one thing slide. Just one more thing," and things slid, slid, slid with absolutely no end.
How: could I let someone take advantage of me I wondered? How could I not have said anything, not even at the very end?
Where: am I going?
Who: will I need to stand up to next? There were a million reasons it hurt and one of them was because I was feeling achy in my skin again. I had heard something about Barack earlier in the morning and was reminded of my blackness again. Someone had called him a nigger and I had somehow felt personally attacked. When I thought about my relationship and my skin, I remembered that my relationships have always felt wrong because of the difference.
I have always dated white people and in my two longest relationships I never felt accepted by my significant others families.
I cried for acceptance. I cried for a love that I'm constantly pushing away.
I called Riri and Raleigh because that's what I do when I need immediate love, immediate reminders of how special I am. They laughed into the phone. They laughed because they knew if they laughed, I would. They were right. "Push your cheeks up they said, just push them up for a few minutes and you'll be fine. Remember, when things are rough you can always laugh." I stopped crying and blew my nose one last time. Made a promise to myself that things will never be the same, I won't be ashamed of my skin and I won't let them shame me and I won't take the blame even if they blame me.

Crushed

That muscle, the one inside that keeps us from falling apart seems not to be working the right way these days. It's still pumping my blood, but it seems to be faster and harder and the chamomile tea won't slow it down. Tea doesn't work on lust induced heartache, though I had hoped in the drinking that it would do so.
My friends that know me well, know that crushes aren't good for me. They know that I give too much to someone I know very little of. This is the first one that I've really had in months, since right before I joined the church last May. When I began going to church all of that unbalanced emotion went into my need for God, but right now it is in a state of flux.
The last one was bad, very teary eyed, hole in my chest, disengaged from reality kind of bad. Actually... it was typical of my life. I've done this all of my life, found something or someone to focus on so that I didn't have to focus on myself.
I suppose this is my first crush after becoming a Christian and I'm not sure how to deal with it. I feel a little guilty for wanting someone or the "idea" of something, which is a relationship with someone I don't really know that well.
I need to refocus my energy on God, on my writing, on my music, and the rest of my life. I have a song that I wrote about this a few months ago and want to go sing it for need of an outlet. Singing is sometimes the only thing that will calm my nerves and give me peace.

On a side note: I love being at this cafe and listening to conversations. What used to bother me about listening was that everyone was always having the same conversation and the fact that nothing is new bothered me and sent my into depressive episodes because of the pointlessness of all things. I felt defeated by the reality of the situation and it was that nothing I could say or do would matter. Things have changed since then, I love hear people laugh and learn and be...

Immersion by excursion

I suppose the amount of days since it happened don't really matter anymore. The amount of days since we last fought, or cried, or manipulated one another into staying, and eventually cheated to leave.
Or... I guess that's what I did because I couldn't stay in it anymore, but couldn't figure a good end. I had tried saying before that we weren't right for one another and she begged me to stay. She said the same and I in turn was on my knees in tears. Things went on like this for years, accusing, lying, struggling, cursing, fucking. It wasn't all bad and I know this because the only times I can seem to remember now are the good ones. There was more bad than good and I remember all of the good and the bad has disassembled itself and laid itself on the periphery and when I'm looking for it I can see it in the distance and can only feel the good. The interesting thing is that "good" when remembered in loneliness begets intense pain and sadness.
And so... I am immersing myself in it in order to move on.
Every few weeks now I go somewhere where my memories of her seem to bind my lungs. I know how it will feel before I go there, but go anyway.

The 2
Is just a metro bus.
Is just a place people shut off, listen to ipods, read papers, look unapproachable, laugh to themselves, phone a friend, waste away.
Is on a route to and from.
Was what I took everyday to and from the place I lived with her.
For eight months I avoided taking this particular bus in the direction of our old life. I actively looked for alternate routes to the same area if I needed to go, but one day my alternate route fell through. I had to be somewhere at a certain time and the only bus I could take was the next 2. As I waited my ribs began to lock and my breaths became more frequent, but I didn't have a choice.
This would be my first immersion.
Step up. Sit down. Look. Breathe. Look. Breathe. Phone Check. Breathe. Breathe.
I was overwhelmed with panic. My first panic attack in months. "Breathe, breathe," I told myself. "Must slow heart down." This was a heart quickened with panic and pained with memory. I knew where I wasn't going and that wasn't home, or my old home, but my body wanted nothing more than to remember home and her and her body in our burgundy 400 thread count sheets she had bought because I thought they were beautiful. I thought that this must be what happens when one is about to die, so I must be dying.
I didn't die.
Instead I called a friend and made him talk. Made him talk me out of my stupidity and the insanity of emotions because I could not cry on the 2. I could not be one of "those" people.
He talked me down.
My lungs began to let some air in. I somehow made it to my destination and shortly thereafter had a shot of cheap well vodka and relaxed. "Fuck her, fuck her for being good sometimes," I told my friend. She sympathized and bought me another shot.
When it was time to go I couldn't take that bus home and found a ride. Couldn't do 2 in one day and let myself be with what it was, but the next time I took that route to the place I can't go back to, it didn't seem to hurt quite as much, just a singe, and later a tingle.
Now this is what I do.

Yesterday was the first time I let myself pass the courthouse. The jail/courthouse that I sent her to and she never forgave me and I never forgave myself for. The place I can never understand, the place I first cried so hard I fell on the floor in front of twenty people and screamed just for them to let me see her and let me touch her one last time. The place I told them that I had lied, even though I hadn't. The place I held her so hard I almost squeezed her life out because I couldn't stand the thought of letting her go. I walked by and stood outside for five minutes and just let myself cry softly on a cold autumn afternoon. Let myself remember that she is not mine anymore and love shouldn't hurt like it did.
I will pass there again and maybe go inside one day to remove the remainder of a history that is over. I suppose it might be true that time heals all wounds, but it's not healing them fast enough so I have to move it along anyway I can. If it is excursions to the past then it'll have to do, if only to move me on to the next destination.

Chapter 1.1

Sometimes I ate the lawn to remind myself that I was alive. The lawn, that was always green but never ours. This lawn was perfectly manicured and surrounded by a steel gate painted forest green, that I thought looked much more the color of the poop of our neighbors baby.
This lawn eating was actually a little blip in the line of obsessive compulsive disorders I would have as a child, but wait... I'm getting ahead of myself. As stories begin, this is still about the lawn I've always wanted. I'll begin again.

Palm Street is hot in the summer. One can tell how hot by how much the asphalt bubbles and the street swells. In flip flops we jump on bubbles to let free the hot air beneath. They look like boils and feel like balls of Jell-O beneath our tiny feet; we love them but for the heat that radiates through our shoes and singes our skin. Keneshia and I do this for hours when there is nothing else to do. We are old enough that dolls and toys are of no interest, but too young to venture far from the safety of our condo city.
Our condo city is filled with lawns cut and cared for by people we never see and is greener than the Crayola color of the same name. African lilies grow in equal numbers in front of each condo. From the south to the north there are seven complexes with four condos each; two lower and two upper levels connected. Each are painted the exact same shade of dull gray with an evergreen trim. Every lower condo has exactly four African lily bushes, neon green lawn, and two sprinklers in front of them, supporting the overuse of water and the “beautification” of a city. Even in times of drought, these lawns never go brown and in times of plenty the lawns just go to mush.
Today we are pulling the bulbs from the lilies in order to find out more about their insides. They are like damp flour, sticking to our fingers, and we grind each petal into the lawn hoping for the spread of seed.
Palm Street is where I grow up with Keneshia, though she actually lives in other condos on another street. Before Palm street there was another street that I am barely able to remember, so this is the street I will mostly call my home except for when I am with Riri and Raleigh at Lage House.
Palm street smells like barbecues, tamales, and exhaust, though never all at the same time. It is a mostly Latino neighborhood and my mother and I are two of the five black people living on it. Our condo is low income housing that my mom had waited on a list for. The condo is two bedroom, two bathroom, which means I have a bathroom of my own. It is the standard setup, living room, dining, small kitchen with an inlet and outlet to the aforementioned rooms. There is a hall that leads to my room with my bathroom on the right and my mom's room on the left. Most of the time I love this condo because it is ours and I can call it home, but there are other times when I am pained by the fact that my mom will not get us a dog because the condo is "too small" and there's no yard for a dog to run around in. At night I have dreams of doggy doors that open up to backyards.
During my childhood there are a number of things I will ask my mother for that she will never get me.
A dog
A front yard
A backyard
A sister
While my mom made it clear to me that she was unable to have anymore children due to having a hysterectomy, I became increasingly vocal about needing a sister.
"A little one! I want a little sister to take care of, why can't you have one?"
"I can't honey," she would say and repeat once again that they had taken the part she needed inside of her to have babies, out.
Eventually she would find me a sister, but not the one I wanted. She lived with us on Palm Street for six months and then she disappeared. She wanted a front yard too, but that was something my mom couldn't give to her either and so on she went from us. There will be more of her later, but Palm Street begins much earlier than that when my feet and my body are still small and I am still innocent.

Chapter None = Preface

I am waiting to hear music.

Wait.

Wait with me. I have been waiting and it is coming, I am sure of it.

It is deep and long.

It is earthy and sooty.

I think someone once told me my ancestors are the reason I long for dark notes. As if the low notes are the sorrow of my African Ancestors. The deepness is my black side.

If I sing an octave higher am I yearning for my white? Am I betraying my skin? My brownness that has been called Spanish, Brazilian, Ethiopian, African-American, and more.

I am waiting to hear music that defines the way my hands and feet move and how my eyebrows curve.

I am waiting to hear music that describes the way wind hits a single leaf and forces it to the ground.

I am waiting to hear music that tells me what love death melancholy anger is when I am not in them.

I am waiting for music because I am worried that memories captured with words can never say enough of what I want to say. The words only moisten the idea while music floods with meaning.

Scents of smell

It is said that when you lose one sense, another sense is heightened. I have not technically lost any sense, but find myself consistently gravitating away from and wishing one away and that is touch. To put it firmly, I don't like being touched unless I am really drunk, which I suppose is usual on the side of Friday and Saturday, not that I want it to be this way.
I had the very negative experience recently of a guy putting his arm around my shoulders and feigning closeness when I undoubtedly had only gone on one date with him and found myself wrenching away from him because this was too much for me. You might think, "this girl should definitely get some help," and the appropriate response from me is, "yes, I know I should," but this blog is not about touch, it is about smell.

One of my favorite things
I hope this classic tune is now moving betwixt your ears and onto your tongue, because the sense of smell tops my list of favorite things.

I often try to classify smells by how "favorite" they are, but realized the other day as I was on the bus inhaling the clippings of dying flowers and mowed lawns on the crisp fall air that there is no way to classify smells as such. Each time one hits and it creates a memory or jingles one out it becomes the best most meaningful scent at the time. On this particular day I mourned the passing of summer while greeting the entrance of fall, while realizing this scent is particular to this in-between season that lasts anywhere between two and four weeks. I consistently forget to savor the moment of the scent and think about how I will miss it when it goes, because I am always worrying on the way things fade without me.
Some smells weigh more than others. There is a morning crispness during the spring that is the awakening of millions of flowers entreating the world to look at an abundance of new life that is my nemesis. This is for me the most painful of smells because it remembers the darkness of the spring of my 17th year alive. When I inhale this kind of day I immediately become that seventeen year old, dressed in grays and blacks, with big unkempt hair awaiting some kind of ending. I cannot endure these days and wish for the very beginning of spring to pass quickly, luckily here in Seattle it usually does.
On the other end, there is the smell of firewood specifically burning in fireplaces or wood stoves. I think it is that firewood on the winter air has a deeper, muskier smell, which I admit I could be wrong about. This is the one smell that makes my pulse rush and my breath heavy and I have never been sure why. This is the one and only smell that immediately turns my mind from pure to staggeringly sinful. Okay, pure would be an outright lie, my mind is far from it, but... you get my gist.
The one thing that I will never understand about my sense of smell is something I've told many people and it is that I can smell sickness on others [I should note that this is usually men]. No, I cannot sniff out cancer, but when someone is sick there is an odor that emanates from his/her body that is disturbing for me and makes me a little sick. I should also say this is usually people with an opposing body chemistry. For people that I tend to mesh with and generally like the natural smell of, the smell does not seem to present itself. This has done nothing less than confuse me for many years of my life.
I would gladly give up a little of this sense for want of the one I am afraid of, turn away from, think of as liquid fire as my skin smarts from simple hugs, but... this is what I live with. I will sniff glue to remember my teddy bears if that's what I have to do.

The box I reside in

Is brown and a bit cubicular. Sometimes I try to white wash it but run out of paint and it remains undone and the dark is still present.
This is the box of my body, the darkness that is my skin and the whiteness that lends itself to give me the "latte" color skin a customer at Starbucks once told me I have. Sometimes I write a reminder on my palm that says "BLACK" so I don't forget because no one else seems to.
The thing is that I grew up always knowing that I'm the "good" kind of black, the docile one, the one that knows her place, the "white" one. The explanation for this being that I'm acceptable because I am educated, do not use Ebonics on a regular basis, and am not "loud." Yes, I am using a lot of "quotation" marks to pick out the stereotypical concept of blackness and what it is to be black.
As I child I must have forgotten to pick up my copy of Get your black on because instead I began to use proper English, showed up in my classes on time, and... didn't enjoy listening to Hip Hop. In recent months I've had increasing conversation with other black and biracial women that have also been told they talk or act "white" and we posed this question to ourselves and others. What is acting?

The questions people ask
I was asked by a friends Mother just weeks ago how I felt about people acting black.
My first response was that I just don't give a damn because for me the art of acting [insert culture] means that one is acting out a stereotype. Acting black = speaking in Ebonics, wearing sports jerseys, listening to hip hop, eating barbecue chicken, and enjoying stand up comedy . Acting white = using proper English, wearing form fitting clothes, listening to Indie Rock favorites, and according to the hilarious blog Stuff White People Like, Coffee and Facebook. Do I have it right? According to these two lists I must be white. I also like math, does that make me Asian?
The thing is, is that black and white are not actions, they are indeed still colors that we have assigned to a set of skin tones. People seem to not be able to differentiate actions from colors.
While one person might assign me white by my actions, a retail worker defines me by my skin tone and follows me around the store. Is there a button I can buy that says, "assigned white by 93% of people that know me," while the other 7% is my slightly ghetto side, so that I'm not watched and followed so closely?
Nope. Guess what? By any standard I am still black, though "acceptable" once I've spoken.
What I am getting at is that I'm not "acting" anything nor do I think that white boys in jerseys are "acting." I think they are being and living in whatever skin feels right to them. Identification does not come from pigmentation but from what fits right, kind of like the genes, oops I mean the jeans one ends up buying. Are these people identifying with the culture of [insert] or the stereotype of [inserty again]? Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, but one knows when they've met an educated black man that is entrenched in his black culture but is still called "white" that there is a serious disconnect between the reality of race and the collective misinformed racial consciousness.
If someone decides to appropriate a racial stereotype, I cannot be angry because I cannot justify a reason to be angry at something that is superficial, but if someone tells me I'm acting white again, I might just have to take uh beeotch down.

Note: Thank you to Stuff White People Like and Da Ebonics Page

Boyfriend in a noose

I played a show last night and met a girl, nameless for right now, that was in one of the bands we were headlining for. I could describe this girl as classically beautiful but it wouldn't give homage to the way her lips curl into a pout and her features are so delicate they could make men leap to their deaths just to kiss her feet.
I met her because her band said they wanted us, Hot Grits!!! to play with them at some of their future shows. When I saw her, my heart immediately dropped without even knowing the information that was to come. I was stunned by her eyes, marked with grave sadness though her spirit remained feisty and compelling. She raised her fist at the men of guitar center for asking "what instrument her boyfriend plays," even though she had come alone to find her own gear and I was taken in. She clearly did not seem to be flailing about through life and soon after, I found out that really she was enraged and numb, which peculiarly can coexist. A week and a half ago, her boyfriend hanged himself. She wasn't the one who told me, her bandmates did. Her bandmates that I didn't know, but were obviously numb too were drinking themselves into a temporary stupor because death sometimes drives people to that, to obsessively placate the side of themselves that wants to cry, die, fly away into no that false hope of good night.
I tried to place myself for the rest of the night into their shoes... into her shoes. If they hadn't said something I would have just thought she had drunk herself into a mindless melancholy, instead I knew she was drinking to get out of it.
It was because of a long ago memory that I cared as much as I did, not that I would have otherwise been callous.

College... [numerous things want for insertion here]
The story of K, a pseudo love story.
She was an RA in an old dorm of mine and I had fallen in love with her words. The first time I met her was a poetry reading at The Kickstand Cafe in my senior year of college. She was doing a reading for her poetry class and I came along to see what my old prof.'s new students were up to.
BT, with an overfilled earl grey singeing his hands said, "I really think you should meet this girl, she reminds me of you. She's good." I took my seat in the back room of the cafe and waited for this girl, this wonder of wonders that BT was so enamoured with and put my jealous face on. She was stealing my place as his favorite student and I had to assess the damage.
The room as a whole is filled with dark and brooding hopeful writers dressed in blacks and dark grays, gripping their coffees a bit too tightly.
Students go up and students sit down and I am on the whole unimpressed and am sure that in this room full of budding writers there's got to be a good one and then he called her. "Kristina, how about you?" I saw her petite frame and medium length dirty blond hair and thought, "she's got nothing good to say." She got up and wrapped herself in the wooden chair up front and flipped through a few pages. Her thumb used her tongue for leverage on the papers and she found her spot. As she breathed to read I could hear it... her sadness, a life of loss unwinding before us. Of course, this is why she is so good - she is lost. And finally she read. She was just reading words, but they were perfectly puzzled together and there was space where space should have been and not where there shouldn't. He was right, she was fucking fantastic, she was better than me, she was sadder than I had ever been; my heart was immediately impaled and wanted the sword to be driven deeper.
I had to know more of her from that point on, this girl of despair. However, there are things I know now about my lust that I didn't understand then. 1. I was captured by something that I knew much about and could translate from her to myself, which was the desperation of despair. I had lived it for many years and was drawn in by it again. 2. Savior complex- when I met her I was better, or as "better" as one gets when suffering from bi-polar disorder. I was convinced that if I just talked to her I could make her better.
Neither of the aforementioned things makes for anything but heartbreak, besides that, she was straight. I found myself needing to be near her and asking one of my friends to let me know if she would be in the SUB - student union building, just so I could see her. My friend JE had a class with her and was on the shallow side of being her friend, meaning acquaintance and so he would sometimes talk to her and I would listen in. I overheard her speak of her pills one day with her friends and she laughed a bit, something I knew meant she was hiding.
A few weeks later I constructed an e-mail, which I liked to consider my Jesus mail, being that it was supposed to "save" her. I wrote about my depression and getting through it and this and that and this and that and hit... save. I neither deleted nor sent this e-mail to her. I saved it and fixed it and savored it for the right moment to send. Thought on how a girl that barely knew my name would understand such a candid e-mail. I never hit send.
March 12th, 2003 - [fuck that seems like a long time ago] the girl I was secretly in love with committed suicide, with a noose around her neck.
For a long time I thought that sending that e-mail would have done something and maybe it would have- for a day. Perhaps it would have made her think for one second that someone cares, but then I thought about the reality of it. At my worst, not even obvious love and affection could make me understand that I was worthy of space, I have difficulty now at my almost best.
Life can often feel like a pile... but when I heard that another, another, and another had committed suicide I couldn't help but feel that momentary jealousy that I used to feel, the "why am I not strong enough to die?" feeling that creeps up and wonders at why I could go only as far as some pills and water.
No day is carefree. I am not carefree. But to those reading I'm kind of glad you're alive and I'm alive to let you read it.

First Blog

I'm gonna get my first blog overwith like it doesn't matter that this is something I never do. I'm not gonna say "fuck the world" and "fuck you too," because really I don't care enough to say those things to anyone right now and "fuck" is too blanket of a statement to often be a logical one. "Get off your ass and open your eyes!!!" is one I might want to shout, but... this is Seattle. This is me writing my first blog on a predictably cold and rainy autumn day. The only thing missing is my decaf [insert warm fuzzy beverage here]- yes I fucking drink decaf or I'd be buzzed all day everyday- and a good book [insert something that has a nice cover, because yes I do choose books by their covers]. This is me asserting my passive aggressive will in a typically Seattlite way, though I'm not from Seattle. No, I'm from San Jose, CA fairly close to the home of Mac and I use a PC. So later when you call me an elitist, priviledged, interracial feminist that doesn't understand what it's really like to [insert whatever you feel repressed by] please refer to the fact that I am in fact still susceptible to viruses and most likely will or have had your cold.