Smith's Famous Farm, 3:19, May 12 2008

In between jobs, places where I thought I wanted to be, I discovered a few things, mainly those things that I wish were still left hidden and never saw the light of day.

I found that families aren't happy, your parents don't like each other, and only occasionally do your siblings talk to each other. I found myself writing about those things that i had always hated even mentioning, on the fringe of conversation, because these things only happen to other people. What I found is that we hide things because we are afraid of the truth, not only of ourselves, but of our own flesh and blood, our own essence, and we hate each other for it. It only takes a complete breakdown in life, such as my own, to bring everyone to their knees, but even then one must expect their hopes to be squashed. Weakness is something that is hushed, hidden, thrown behind closed doors.

inbetween walking around the backyard that i used to mow ten years ago i realized that there's nothing i can do, aside from trying to mend those raw places, to fix anything. my father has his old house, my brother has his multiple families to deal with as well as his wifes', my sister has to figure out the farm life, and i'm stuck here with nothing, here between everything and nothing.

*

i talked to my old chef on the way down to Charlotte and i had to confess that i breathed easier here. it's a different way of life, i have people appologizing for stepping in front of me five feet before. go figure. i'm on very good terms with the cashier at the whythville, va gas station simply because she carded me twice. between talking to her best friend who apparently had a friend who suicided herself. stranger things...

my sister just passed through the kitchen and said nothing. this is my family. and you can ask, Why didn't you say something? it's not my house. poor excuse, but very valid.

*

i wish there was a way for us to be a family again. walking around the old house yesterday i realized that the only people who have taken action against the people who leave that religion are those still in that religion. i might be wrong, but chastizing those who leave seems a bit on the revenge side of things. what is perhaps worse is that those that stay are sanctioned, so that they can do nothing. my father was a deacon, an elder at one point, treasurer, but now he is nothing, and all i can wonder is if it is because of his standing and refusal to not cut his own children off.

*

and i had a good heading for this about 400 miles ago but who cares now.

Hope Furnace, 4:30, May 30 2008

chance brought me down on your side

she's just along for the ride

*

we spent two or three nights in Wall, SD last year this time, not because it's any great shakes but just because it was right outside the Badlands, and we'd sleep late, go hike, and then go sit and talk to the bartender at the Badlands Bar or play some pool or just talk to the locals before heading back to the room and repeating the next day. and it's not that i like to think about these things, especially right now, because all they do is depress me and stress me make me want it all to disappear. i sent a friend a text message with the gist that i was holed up in the Badlands with a beautiful girl that i think i may just love beyond anything i'v ever thought possible, and i remember after i sent that i just sat on the edge of the bed for a bit and watched her sleep, thinking that i just might be the happiest person on the planet at that time, because it had been so long since i'd felt anything even resembling love.

and they're right, they're all right, because i don't know how to let go, let it slide, fade into the past and be able to just think fondly on things without having it drag me down again and again. You're a ponderer, my buddy M says a while back, And you've got to learn how to stop thinking about every little possibility and nuance and just do it, you're gonna make mistakes either way because there's no way to avoid them no matter how much you try to avoid them. and i suppose he's right, because it falls in line with not being able to let the past go, they just go hand in hand.

but it hurts, it still does, and i don't know how to make it go away. even when i wake up fresh (on occasion, it happened this morning for a second) it only takes a few minutes until the reality of everything is just back in my face. i have to make a conscious, mental and physical effort just to get motivated to do anything, and even then i find that i'll be halfway through a task and find that i've just lost ten minutes because i got lost in my own head. slipping away, piece by piece.

*

i'm thinking of a number between everything and two
and it's molecules of you

i wish that we were still in your room

in your bed and you were holding me

*

i do my best not to think that this time last year i felt like i was embarking on an adventure for the first time in forever, full of uncertainty but expectation, hope and desire. All those things that make you feel alive when you've done nothing but exist for so long, stumbling through a poor excuse for life and doing nothing but working. i resist pulling out the pictures, avoid the curiosity of getting those two disposables finally developed because it's not going to make things better, it's just going to make it worse and send me back to some bottomless pit.

*

reading because i can't even look at tv, it holds my interest for mere seconds. finally reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time ever, and while the style is still interesting after over 50 years, i think the ability for it to impact me passed long ago and all it does is make me cringe in places. i wonder if it may be possible that Salinger wrote the first instance of a drunk caller in American fiction, irritating converstation and embarassing reality of it all.

*

i'm afraid, bewildered, and feeling more hopeless all the time. i wish i could just sink all the way down and be done with it, but i'm still able to pull myself out at times, which makes it frustrating, because all my mind is doing is just going in circles. manic depressiveness perhaps, but it think it's just that everything is exaggerated because of circumstance. all i want to do is just get life moving again, move beyond all these uncertainties and start living again. let it happen, let it be, let it go.

It was Memorial Day. After the bar shooting, but before everything went to hell. I was north of Columbus with my sister and her in laws, apparently every single one of them on down to second cousins, children included. I had gotten in early Saturday morning after a horrible close Friday night; understaffed and overworked, as usual. Didn't even intend on being here, I had requested the extended weekend off, as well as the following week as I did have some paid vacation time coming to me, but my sister suggested it a month ago and on a whim I decided to take her up on it.

"We hardly ever talk, and the last time you came down was over two years ago. People don't live forever and you know our grandmother wants to see you."

I had thought about it then, for a beat, and said, "Ok."

To be honest, I had no more of a game plan than just taking the time off and never leaving the house. I wanted to revisit the places I had been ten years previous but that was then and this was now. I was now in Columbus, or north of there, like I said before.

"I'll visit her, and call a few other people up. I'll see you in a couple weeks."

"Call first. You know this isn't easy."

And that was that. And here I am. Middle of a BBQ on Memorial Day, only the second time I've had it off in the last ten years, surrounded by the in laws of my sister, which is fine because they're all good farmers and people that accept you as is, but hard because they all have their ear on the grapevine. I came down here for a stint because even though things were good for me business-wise, personally it's all gone to hell. Even my boss from ten years ago had something to say.

"Why the h-e double toothpics can't you just settle down?" he asks over the phone, as I'm stuck in rushour traffic on the way back from seeing my father.

"Because I can't even figure myself out, let alone anyone else. She's kicked me out, and even though I have my own place again, I'm lost. And please don't feed me lines, you know me better..."

But he had already cut me off. It's funny, odd, complex how you don't talk or see or even have anything to do with certain people but somehow time never matters. We skirted around religion yet all the time talking about it, and in the end I realized that I will always be friends with certain people in my life, regardless of whether I speak to them every ten hours or ten years.

The BBQ was going though, and I was doing my best to avoid everyone. I'd spent the previous two days either sleeping or reading, and sometimes, late at night, starting the car up and driving the interstates around Columbus, exiting when I felt close by something that I remembered, and then circling endlessly around that spot. I discovered that I was lost, bewhildered, numbed, to everything. All that I had was lost, removed, bulldozed over, paved, it doesn't matter.

So again, here I was, next to the stainless grill. My brother in law offers me a dog. I say hello to my sisters' in laws, good folk, always treated me like their own, and then I just wander off to a patch of grass on the edge of the field.

"Your sister tells me you smoke."

I look up, probably for the first time today. In between chewing the dog I say "That's not uncommon knowledge." I also see that she's probably late 20's. Thin, built but not disportionatly, and long hair. I've been set up, is all I can think. "How are you stuck with these guys?" she asks, looking everywhere but near me.

"I'm her brother," I say, pointing at my sister across the minions of people in her backyard. "Who are you?"

"Same boat as you, I got married in because of my siblings and now I get dragged along just because I have no life." She paused for a minute, I finished my dog, and then we stopped looking at the soybeans still sprouting. "You wanna take a walk? There's an old schoolhouse a mile or so down the road," I threw out.

"Sure. Gotta be better than reuniting people that I've never met before."

*

Not less than halfway to the schoolhouse she asks for a smoke. The first words she's said since we left the brooha. It's then when I stop being nice. "What do you do?" is the most competent thing I can come up with, simply because stupidity seems the best tactic. It works, which is more than I can say for my Zippo because it gave out and I had to rely on the matches. "Social Work. Apparently I know how to pick the brooding tempetuous guys out in any crowd, family included."

I stop for a second. She stops too. We're at a point where the fields are separated by a grass road, and I opt for going there, the trees offering a respite from the blazing sun of nearly summer.

We walk some, stumbling through the grass clumps and rutted quasi-road that is between these fields that have been farmed for the past 200 years. I was choosing my words. "I'm the odd man out. I don't belong here, and I think that you feel the same."

Silence. I looked at her. "We don't know each other, right?"

"Right."

"So why are you here?"

"Just filling time. Why are you asking hard questions when you know they're just coming back at you."

I paused. A hummingbird, something I've never seen before, was hovering three feet in front of me. We seemed to be looking at each other, and then the bird buzzed off, literally, that's how it sounded, and I turned to her. "You want to see that schoolhouse?"

*

We walked down the road, getting there. I waved to my sisters' neighbor, a mile from where she lived, and he waved back. "I don't know who you are," I said.

"Same here. Do you want names?" I thought back to all those gatherings, things a million years from here where I never knew names but still made friends that I thought would last forever.

"You can call me Jer. After all that I've gone through the least I can do is be honest with my name." I felt remorse, pain, suffering, everything at this. All or nothing, because I have nothing left to lose.

Nothing. We walked for a bit. Trees overhead shading the road before us. Walking. She had a silver ring on her left hand, ornate but not jeweled. The cigarette was in her right hand. She tossed it aside into the still stream.

"You can't keep blaming yourself." She stopped. "All your family cares about you, but can't help you. You're the only one who can help yourself. Stop trying to make everyone else happy, you can't do it. The only person you can help is yourself, and you're not willing to do it." At this point I was beside the road, sobbing, crying out loud, and not being able to stop.

We had finally made it to the schoolhouse, me stumbling along the way, half supported on her, but we were there. It was built in 1893, a single room brick house for the farmer's kids and served in that fashion until the ungodly time of 1956, when everything finally got consolidated. Since that time it's served mainly as a place for drunks to throw their garbage bags full of Miller Lite. It is true that the living have no respect for the past, regardless of history.

We stepped through the high weeds, cornflower and Queen Anne's Lace and all those other wildflowers that people in the suburbs love. It made me think, reflect, rebuke myself, but so what. But here I am with someone who's broken it all down for me, and they still don't know the half of it.

The sun was setting. "What do you want," she said as she sat down against the west-facing wall. "How about if I just forget everything and start over."

I thought about it all again, considering my options, bent low towards her, and our lips met, but not before I asked, "Who are you?" Because I never really did get an answer.

sometimes i feel like i'm breathing underwater

found i left two things of importance back in Madison, but i'll get them eventually. stupid stupid stupid. you move on by not thinking about it, ignore it but maybe that's not the right word. complete disbelief regarding everything, even down to the fact that it was one month to the day between her mom dying and me leaving that place for good. and i neglected the bizarreness of my sister's father in law shooting an albino skunk in her front yard the night i talked to her for the last time, and thinking to myself save a bullet for me.

useless and dejected, all i really want to do is call up all these people there and yell and rant and rave and tell them all how fucked up it is on both sides, and that i'm not the bad guy, but then i remember that i have nothing left there, that it doesn't matter any more. let her say what she wants, believe what she wants. whatever makes you feel better in the end, because that's what lead her to this point. i can only imagine what she's telling her shrinks about me, but again it doesn't matter anymore. i cashed out, and whatever form of reality she's spewing has no effect on me anymore. i got out with one friend left, so considering how i showed up three years ago i'm still ahead in the game.

*

found hums' Downward is Heavenward online, got it burned to the hard drive but doesn't want to burn to disc. irritating. nice hearing it again for the first time in over five years.

it really is the little things...

my ghost likes to travel

as it always happens, i found the best exit strategy about two hours after i left town. all i had to do was call up the bar where the x and the b's were, ask the bartender to have them look out the front window where i would be doing a very dramatic bow, and then leave. but of course, this came to me after i was already going through Chicago.

so.

*

there is nothing left. empty shell. lobotomized. all i can focus on is the future, which is good.

but oh so very hard at times. nothing like clearing your own crap out of the bedroom and finding a pair of his boxers under the bed. or the fact that she's still hiding liquor under the kitchen sink. i should feel bad about this, broadcasting this to my audience of one (myself) but i put it here so i can remember just how fucked up it all really was and what i did to try and protect it. i go searching through tossed mail just to see if there's anything for me, but that really doesn't matter. all i can say is that i hope she doesn't waste it.

*

seriously, though, fuck it all.

There is this place inside

where all the good things die

*

i guess i foretold it, i have official confirmation that i am a smartass dick, probably just because that's what i've turned into. i'm done caring, yeah i still have crap in Madison but crap is replaceable, books are just that, books, and while i do have a small assortment of stuff that i don't want tossed out on the street, i could deal with it if that's what it comes down to. i guess what pisses me off the most is that she can't for an instant take a good look at herself. i'm not claiming the moral high ground for an instant, i know i fucked up royally with a lot of things, but seriously, just accept the fact that all you want to do is prod me into this kind of situation right now and then wonder back at why i respond the way i do. dammit i hate blogs.

*

i swore to myself two things when i got back to OH, one that i was going to do my best to quit the cancer sticks, and two, that i was going to dry myself out. i'm down to two packs a week and hadn't come close to the booze in nearly four weeks but this night got the better of me. it's all about willpower, strength, whatever, and i made the conscious decision to go the other way. bury myself, find out if there's anything here at all. my sister's family, her in-laws, they're amazing people, salt of the earth, don't do anything bad except have poorly disciplined children but if that's the worst offense then so what. my sister told me way back that she knew she found a good guy, he didn't smoke, didn't drink, and neither did any of his family. gotta love that. but i found myself betraying myself tonight, simply because i couldn't handle the idiocy that's happening three states away. i don't have the strength. or as the x would say You lost your balls.

*

i suppose in the end all i get is what i deserve. i find it hard to believe that this time last year i had a questionable but steady job, a girl that i had just started going out with and was considering taking with me on vacation, and a truly uncertain future with all of the above. it hurts. before this shit happened i found some photos of that trip and landed the one of the jail in South Dakota on the fridge. she asked me, numerous times since the new year, Why are you still with me? Why don't you leave me? and all i could ever say is because i love you, and i'm not going to give up because of this. but it's never enough. it never is. you can try to take care of yourself, and those around you, and those you love, but it still always comes down to who you are. do you have the balls to stick through everything, the long nights with no sleep, the wondering if she's going to still be alive when you wake up, the hope that a new medication brings, the idiocy of your own life mixed up in all this as well. and then, when something finally works, yes you question how bad and messed up you've been but you realize that there's light at the end of the tunnel, that this med for her might be doing good rather than bad, but she starts asking the hard questions that you're so good at evading. and you freak out, especially because she doesn't come home a couple nights. and i can't do the third person anymore.

all she had to do was just stop supplanting him for me. it wasn't much, god only knows i'd been through all that before with her and her with me but why couldn't she just talk. You're not a positive influence, she says, And I can't be here, you and this place remind me too much of my mom. which is fine, that's understandable, but when it escalades into days and nights away with no contact, what am i supposed to do? seriously. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?

Blankness and darkness, like underneath the leaf

have settled on me here and scraped away the sound

*

i swear, i'd like one day where i don't feel like tearing my hair out. as my buddy M says, It doesn't matter what you feel or what they deserve, focus on getting results. i wish it were that easy. she's getting in a huff up in Madison over what i don't know, i've made arrangements and i'm not going to be staying over in the apt, just grabbing my shit and running but for whatever reason that's not good enough or too soon or too late or whatever and all it does it make my blood boil because it doesn't have to be this drama soap opera crap. and she doesn't have to go ahead and be a shit about things after the fact, I'll probably be sleeping elsewhere anyways she writes back and this part of me just wants to be that smartass and write back by the way say hi to B for me, i'm sure he's feeling better after not getting any for nine months.

but i guess i'm not exactly ready to risk the safety of 20 years worth of books yet. i'm getting close to not caring about that either though.

dammit dammit dammit fuck fuck fuck. this whole thing is really starting to piss me off and i don't like being pissed off but it's the only thing that feels good, it's the only thing that distracts my mind from the fact that she turned to one of the few good friends i had in Madison instead of me and he's the one sleeping on my side of the bed now. fuck.

i'm thinking of a number

between everything and two

*

it doesn't get any easier, i just end up hoping that time and space will allow me to grow strong. i'm not good at this, having to seperate myself from what i poured everything i had into, but having to walk away. leave it. move beyond it. let it go.

i sleep fitfully, waking at strange times and still having that sense of displacement, always followed by What am I doing here? i don't recall my dreams now, which bothers me as much as remembering them did, because i felt that i was at least working through all the garbage of this mess in my subconscious, but without them it seem like i'm in stasis, moving neither forwards nor backwards, simply existing.

got a text from her last night, When are you planning on coming to Madison? and even before i read it i started shaking, not out of anger but of fear for myself. i still can't handle this, i am drained both mentally and physically and don't have the fortitude to go back there, pack up what little of me there is, and leave. turn my back, walk away. these things that i have to do, that i must do, i don't know how to do them let alone survive. it hurts too much. while sipping my coffee on the back steps this morning, all these things rattling around in my dumb head, i had to fight the urge to throw up. it's incapacitating.

You shouldn't even think about trying to go out with anyone for six months, my sister says to me last night, Just make this happen down in Charlotte and work. and i tell her this is how i've always gotten by before, just throwing myself into work and using it to erase everything. You don't need to put yourself or especially anyone else through any kind of rebound, at which i immediately think to myself that doesn't mean i'm not going to screw it all out of me along the way.

at least you know

you were taken by a pro

*

time to liquidate life. which is hard when you really don't have much anymore, so it's down to severing the final ties to an instrument that i've been toting around from place to place for 10 years and not even looking at, aside from making sure it's still there. i realize it's a quick fix to a temporary situation, but it's not the first time i've considered this. however, this would be the first (and hopefully last) time i've ever been at this point in life, where there is nothing to go back to and nothing happening for a couple weeks. can't continue to be a complete charity case.

*

there's always things that remind you of the relationship, things along the way that make you pause and say Oh yeah, the last time i did this was with her. it's never been too bad for me, usually just the occasional thing, object, situation that will make me think back on it, but this time around it's extreme, where not a single day goes by and i find myself going back to that that time and getting stuck in it. can't watch the Daily Show or Colbert because i simply see us on the bed together laughing ourselves silly. can't even think about certain movies. her breaking down at the end of The Fountain. the week long discussion about Everything Is Illuminated. it's like my own personal ghost that follows me around, the sad nuisance that won't pass on.

and i can't sleep. decided i was dragging myself down by re-reading Theroux so i decided that a few Fletch books that i haven't read in years would be a good distraction, but all that happens is that i find that it's 230 in the a.m. and i'm still wide awake, only to be disoriented and foggy at 814 the next morning when i find that i slept in the same position for the last 6 hours and can't get back to sleep. and i'm done with the dreams. they're here for a while so i might as well get used to it.

*

I need to learn to start feeling good again, she said to me a month ago. The meds weren't working for so long but this new one seems right, I don't feel sad or anxious and I want to start doing things again. It's having to readjust how I've gotten used to feeling and not feeling bad about feeling good. I got so used to feeling like crap for so long that it doesn't feel right to feel good or happy, and it's hard.

so what can i do, i ask.

Help me know that it's all right to feel good, that it's not wrong.

what good is a used up world

and how could it be worth having

*

confidence is nice, especially when you don't have it for so long. not that things are great yet, or even good, but at least there seems to be progress on the work side of things. spoke for over 75 minutes with the southern AD this morning and it went swimmingly well. looks like a sure thing that i'll be down in Charlotte for a few days in a week, just to look things over and do the meet and greet with people. just wish there was a way to get this all done faster. i'm truly tired of waiting for life to begin again, i just want to get back in the thick of things and move on.

*

i feel these dreams, nightmares, whatever you want to call them, are going to be here for a bit. always with these hateful, angry words that go through my unconscious, and i wake up every morning with a sense of dreadful loss, my head muddled and confused and already tired again.

You don't know how to let go, she says, And until you do you shouldn't even think about being in a relationship.

it's exhausting

nothing is good enough for people like you

who have to have someone take the fall

*

waking up earlier but not being able to sleep at night. i'm doing my best not to think too much about things and just do them, or simply not to think, but it's hard not to at times. when i was talking with my old chef, S, last night it just pulled all this spite and anger out of me and i couldn't stop thinking about it. don't think i was able to sleep until after 2, and then i was wide awake at 830. For What? frustration and the irony of it all. merely days after my mental breakdown i was getting bombarded on all fronts by employers, and here i am, three weeks later and i get not one but two calls from headhunters that i haven't heard from in two months. We've got a potential position that you'd be ideal for in Madison! they said 90 minutes apart. not interested, thank you for the thought, but how about Columbus, or Pittsburgh, or...Charlotte?

speaking with the regional guy for the southern locations tomorrow at 10. i'd like to go to Charlotte, in fact i'd really like to go, i feel more confident about this than i did when i was offered the Madison position. reading over that last line and i'm realizing that i think i actually feel confidence in something, maybe even myself, for the first time all year. it got whittled away completely between January and February, and more than anything else i was sure that it was going to be a long time coming back, but perhaps the fact that someone still believes in me (albeit he's the guy that is gunning for me to get down to Charlotte) is helping. i don't know, but it's working.

*

that dream from last night refuses to go away though. the whole thing i felt sluggish, weighed down, like i was trying to run through a swimming pool. and i just vented all these things at her, but she came back at me with everything i couldn't do, or fix, or just plain take care of. it was awful in the way that dreams can be sometimes because the line between real and unreal disintegrated, what we were screaming at each other about was too much like what i wanted to say weeks ago, or even last Saturday.

*

my old friend, R, commented that he sat up all night reading one of my old websites a number of years ago and realized there was a whole other side of me that he ended up knowing. my family knows more about me now than i ever really hoped to share, but i guess that's the cost of losing everything. there's nothing left.

when with every day

another bit falls away.

*

couldn't sleep last night. S called from NYC around 11ish and we ended up talking about the whole situation, and it dredged up all this stuff i've been managing to avoid thinking about for a few days. made me mad more than anything, which i guess is a good thing because i'm finally able to put things in perspective and respond the way i should have in the first place.

but sleep wasn't happening. and when it did, it was horrible things, where we were both working for the same company, and the highrise was under construction but my legs were like lead and i couldn't move and i made us late. and even though the situation was out of my control it was still my fault and i was the scapegoat. just bizarre.

head full of cobwebs.

there is something else there

when all that you had has all gone

*

we're looking at pictures, my grandmother and i. Every time I see these people I say to myself when did you get so old? she says, But then I look in the mirror and have to realize that I'm old too, even though I don't feel it. I'm 89 next month, and I'd hate to be young again, but it's so hard sometimes, getting older.

*

i've always been able to talk with my grandmother like we're just two regular people. that's not to say that the family relationship wasn't there, it's that we can just talk like normal human beings about anything. one of the last times i talked with the x's mom before she died we talked about how it's hard for sons, daughters, the younger generation, to move beyond the familial relationship and just learn to relate and talk to their parents (grandparents, brothers, sisters, etc) like their friends. don't spare details, don't dance around things, just talk like they're your friend.

*

it's all good and bad. things are progressing slowly in regards to Charlotte, but i'm finally talking to the corporate people so it's moving ahead. they want me there for a couple days the week of the 24th. if it goes well i suppose i could be down there for good around this time next month. to be honest i want this to happen sooner than later. i've always been able to pull myself out of breakups by throwing myself into work, and not having it right now is sucking the life right out of my bones. not that i truly want to do anything right now but sleep forever...

and as far as that goes, i usually wake up in a funk but am able to pull myself out of it in a few hours. but it still hurts. doesn't help that for every day of sunshine there are three that are cold, gray and rainy. nice to see i brought that aspect of wisconsin with me here.

nothing fades as fast as the future

and nothing clings like the past.

*

had to get the final word Saturday night. i knew that hope was dim for our future together, but i'd gone all week with nothing more than a few text messages that told me literally nothing. she'd already made the mental break long ago, and essentially told me as much, but i still had to hear it one more time. i couldn't continue to exist if there was even a shred of a chance for us to get through this, and it felt like i was ripping every ounce of my body out piece by piece.

and i think the worst was that i broke down in front of my sister. these are not situations that my family is adept at dealing with, especially when it comes to our own.

this is the hardest thing i've ever done, and i've barely finished the sentence when she says What, fuck yourself? You don't know how to let go, she says, And until you do you shouldn't even think about being in a relationship.

*

i spent yesterday in a daze, and would wake at times thinking i was in Madison and i would reach over and she's not there. i dreamt horrible things, where i was walking around the apartment, being careful to avoid the squeaks in the floor, but then looking up and it's empty, nothing there, no trace of either her or me.

*

there was a tornado watch yesterday afternoon, and this being a semi-rural county the 911 dispatchers were calling every thirty minutes with an update. it was blowing fiercely, rain and debris going every which way, and hearing it all outside simply made me want it to come down, have those 200 mile an hour winds tear through it all, lift me up and take me away, far away. erase it all, remove it, rend it from my body and mind, and leave me hollow and decrepit.

the breathing stops, i don't know when

in transition once again.

*

i made a bet with myself that my mom wouldn't go through with seeing me today. seems i owe myself something.

maybe the worst thing i've ever experienced in my life. i feel like my entire body is falling into itself, collapsing into a pit of nothingness.

i've gone through bad breakups before, yet the sum of them don't compare to how much this hurts, how empty i am.

there is nothing left.

the old

but his laughing lady's loving

ain't the kind he can keep.

*

i keep trying to explain how i feel about her, how i've fallen before but never like this, how i've never wanted to wrap myself up in someone else like this. it's incapacitating, i want to help, not just myself but i want to help her, and i can't, i actually wrote down on paper that i would stay out of the way. and i'm doing my best, maintaining radio silence and not interfering, but it's hard, it's so incredibly hard to stay away and not know what's going on, how she's doing, just anything at all.

my brother says that i need to just leave it behind, "it's not like you were engaged or anything", but it's not that easy this time. i'm lost.

sunset, 8:19 p.m., Delaware, OH

used to feel so much

now i just feel dumb.

*

what a crazy messed up day. i really did think i was losing my mind for a minute because i couldn't remember writing earlier. losing track of time is one thing but completely erasing the memory of doing something is up there with my h.s. senior class trip, which i had no recollection of for two years even though i was taking all the pictures.

the Columbus that i grew up in is gone, long gone and never to return. amazing to see what changes in only a couple years. entire street blocks that i used to ride my bike down when i was a kid are now green spaces. houses are different colors, buildings are gone or replaced. the giant red maple in front of the house i grew up in, a tree that my grandfather remembered walking by in the 1930's when he was going to school, it's gone.

it really is a foreign city, one that i have no connection to anymore. i really can't go home anymore, and i'm not naysaying progress, because a lot of this stuff needed to go, but there's nothing here for me anymore. time to move on. hopefully with my jaw closed rather than agap in shock.

*

got a text from the girl in madison tonight. took me 25 minutes to figure out what to send back, but haven't heard anything since. i swear i just want to run away from it all, leave it all behind, erase it permenently and pray that it never finds me again. it hurts so much.

it'll all work out

eventually.

*

woke up early, tired and alone. i couldn't eat for two weeks, and couple that with being unable to sleep just makes for a very angry body. i mean, between Monday and Friday of last week i slept a total of 15 hours. since i've been here at my sister's i've tried to eat some basic foods, pop generic zantac from time to time, and have slept anywhere between 10-16 hours at a time. one would think that this is a good/bad thing, but it's mainly bad because i'm getting sleep finally, which is good, but the dreams are bad. dreams within dreams. layers upon layers. all these faces and people and things and places and stuff that i don't want to think about, they're all there, and every time i think they're gone i don't wake up, i just find that it was all just a part of the bigger dream, and it makes me have to question reality every morning just to make sure i'm not still asleep.

not pinching myself yet but maybe i should start.

so i actually planned ahead last night, wrote out what i wanted to do today, set the alarm and everything, and i couldn't do it. the alarm went off and all i could think about was the hopelessness of it all, the futility of doing anything, the fact that i don't care about anything anymore. laid in bed for another two hours, in and out of sleep, and the dreams still come, and when i finally woke and forced myself to make some coffee, it was still there, the weight of everything bearing down on me.

and then the phone went off, and my old corporate chef from Claddagh says that he's decided he wants me as his executive sous chef down in Charlotte, in as soon as three weeks. i guess that's how quickly things can change these days.

*

but the feeling doesn't go away entirely. it lingers, like coffee rings inside a porcelain cup.

i miss her so much.

just three words my love...

...you meant everything.

ran across a few things on the old lj a month or so ago. it sums up life pretty well:

Thursday, December 16th, 2004
6:33 am
at some point in the past couple months i became so numb to life that i stopped caring. and i just now realized how dangerous a place that is.

at some point i'll move away from here and wonder what the hell i was doing in Pittsburgh. at the same time i'll probably ask myself why i was working in the restaurant business for so long.

eventually, i'll figure out why i'm 29 and single. and hate people.

*

so to sum up the past year appropriately, i threw everything into my hopes and dreams with someone else, and inbetween all of her problems since last December i finally cracked under the strain. unfortunately i chose to lose my mind two days after her mom died.

and i could get into all the other details, like how we have been having serious discussions about where we're going, what we're doing, and how it's going to happen sooner rather than later. how i stayed up countless nights just because i was afraid of what i might find in the morning if i fall asleep. and not being surprised that our silences overwhelmed everything else, until finally it seemed that a corner was being turned for both of us, and her mom passes away.

and she won't talk to me, but to one of my friends.

and then entire nights pass and she doesn't come home, and won't call or text.

so i do what only seems appropriate, which is to go crazy. and i did, i called relentlessly, just wanting some kind of answer for why. and i had to actually go over and just see for myself, that she wasn't sleeping on the couch like i was told.

i did the only thing possible, that made any sense, and i ejected my mind. i threw it out with the two week old cat litter, because that's about all the good that it had done me the past months.

i have no job, no place to live, no future, and especially no girl, and out of all these it was the girl that was holding me together. she would merely have to call me up and say come home and i wouldn't care, i'd drive 100 miles an hour and be there in five hours and i wouldn't care, i'd never care about any of it...

so i packed up most of my life in Madison, WI and drove all day to Ohio and am staying with my sister and her family for a bit. until i can go a day without breaking down, without finding entire hours go by and all i've done is stare out the window at nothing, when i can eat more than toast and eggs, when i can put down the antacids, when i can sleep less than 16 hours a day.

when i can stop thinking about how there is nothing left, nothing left to lose, because it was all there, in one place with one person, and that is all gone.

*

i am worse than lost, because i don't want to go on. i have loved and lost before, it's stupid to say otherwise, but it's never been anything like this. it's been 13 days and all i feel is cold, miserable, worthless, useless, lots of words that end in -less. i've tried to make sense of it, but there is nothing but the hand squeezing the life out of my heart, the inability to breath deeply because i can't, it hurts too much.