Let them taste the bitter lost mistake of you

When you hear people talk about the magic of making love -- feeling as though through sex two people become one -- they're not talking about that at all. What people mean to say is that at some point in their myriad lives between playing pretend and the present moment, they misplaced their sense of self. Each of us has, at some point, realized the same. It's hard to remember exactly when that crucial piece of you dropped out of sight, but you remember the first time you felt the hollow. You wake up one morning, or you look around your room. Whatever you're doing, it hits you suddenly that something is gone and for all the world, you can't imagine what. It's the equivalent of looking up one day and realizing the sky is red. But more than that, the sky has always been red and somehow you just never saw it before. The entire world has changed, and it hasn't.

That's when the search begins, but you don't know where to look. There's that old picture of you and your best friend from last summer, the one you don't talk to anymore for reasons neither of you can explain to anyone else. In the picture you're smiling -- a real smile -- one you haven't seen on your own face for ages. You find yourself staring in the mirror, expectant. The smile doesn't come.

What do you do, when that happens? When the world has shifted and only you know? Turns out the answer is pretty simple. You do the same thing you've always done, the same way you've always done it. And then there's Him. He's not God, but He feels that important because when He looks at you, and your stomach buzzes like an electric shock, you smile a real smile. How could any girl do anything but chase that feeling?

You come to understand that only someone else can show you who you are. There's always that one precious moment in the midst of the act of love when you find yourself -- as if by taking off your clothes and putting on desire, your true self is realized, but only when someone else is there to find it. After sex, when you lay beside the body that's been in yours, you feel lost again. The seconds trickle past and as each one goes, a little piece of you goes too. Sex is the lie we tell to make ourselves feel less alone. It's the only time we can let ourselves feel that way without wanting to die.

We fall asleep hours after he does, because afterwards he is just a man, and look at the moon. It's a reflection of something brighter, just like us.

-Robyn Lefkowitz

See the strange girl talking to her shadow

When Paige requests an update, an update she shall receive. I suppose I handled his absence as well as I could have done. I was very listless for a few days, but I didn't sink into depression or waste away. There was only one truly bad day, and I got past it. I don't know that I've found any good method of coping with loneliness, but I've discovered I can still turn myself off enough to float through my days.

As for his homecoming, that would require a far more graphic post than I feel all two of you who read this blog would want. XD

I've also decided that someday I'm just going to throw together a book of all the useless bits of things I write down. The scenes that don't get stories, or the stories that don't go beyond basic ideas, or the random snippets I write down in a fit of emotion. I'm going to throw them all together in a book, and I'm not going to edit them, or fit them together, or separate them except by chapter. Then I'm going to publish it, because I feel like some of my best writing goes into those tiny fits of inspiration and it never pans out because it wasn't more then a tiny fit.

I'm also back to my obsession with fairy tales, but I'm not sure what I want to do with them. Part of me wants short stories, part of me wants novels so who knows at this point. I've also felt the urge to revisit a world I created a long-time ago and never fleshed out on paper. I'm not sure I will, though.

Who knows?

Say hello before you say goodbye

My husband is going away for about six days. He leaves Sunday and I'm depressed already thinking about it. It's rather ridiculous if you look at it objectively since we maintained a long-distance relationship for almost a year and a half, but this will be the first time either of us has been away for more than a day or so since I picked up my life and moved here.

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. I'll go to work, sleep, and then what? For most of my free hours, I'm with him and now I'll have a week of just me, the dog, and the cat, neither of whom, despite their best efforts will be able to joke with me and make my long day at work seem funny rather than soul-crushing. I know I sound codependent, and maybe I am, but he isn't just my husband, he's my best friend. There aren't people physically nearby with whom I'm at all close. I have one friend, and we're very casual. She isn't the kind of person I can call up on a whim and ask to go shopping at Walmart with me because I need to buy cat litter.

It's shaping up to be a long week, folks. I can read, I suppose, since I've taken to doing that more often than not these days when I'm awake and alone, but there won't be a break in it for human company. I have a feeling I'll be spending a lot of time asleep or at the gym.

My problem comes from the fact that by nature I am a loner. I don't generally like to be around people, personally speaking. Call me a snobby elitist, but I expect a certain measure of intelligence from people who want to keep my company and to be blunt most people don't hit the mark. Besides that, I have an abrasive personality in many ways. I'm usually honest, whether or not the intended appreciates that. I'm caustic, callous, and if you give me a reason to mock you, I will. There aren't very many people I'm compatible with, and the few people I have found who can stomach me and whom I can stomach are usually separated from me by vast distances.

My husband is one of those people and for the past year I haven't been separated from him hardly at all. We aren't clingy and our companionship isn't forced. We just enjoy each other's company above and beyond sex, or marriage, or duty. I've grown used to having him with me, and now I'll have to go back to my solitary ways, though only for a week, and I will be lonely for the first time in a very, very long time.

I haven't ever been lonely in the sense of missing companionship because until this past year I've never really had a companion. I've had casual friends whom I could handle in small doses, and a few in slightly larger doses, but they were always people I would pick up and put away at my whim, cruel as that may sound. I have never been attached to my family. I'm just really not suited to being a social creature. I'm too intolerant of too many things. It's just my nature, and I don't apologize for it. The only friend I have maintained for more than a few years moved away after only a year of being local and we have maintained our close friendship from a distance, so in her I never found a companion, only a confidante. If ever I have been lonely, it has been for lack of immediate diversion from myself, not for any one person. Any person would have done.

As my relationship with my husband progressed we were only together for four months before he left to join the Marines, and then the relationship was based on distance and scattered visits. Eventually I moved to Rhode Island and vested my interests in him and that has been this past year.

The conclusion all this rambling, maudlin exposition has been for is that I am feeling lonely for the first time in earnest and I don't know how to handle it, nor do I have company with which to mitigate it. I am a twenty year old dealing with issues most people discard in childhood.

There's a hole in the world like a great black pit

My husband and I had an amusing conversation today. They're doing construction behind his work and I asked him about it.

Me: What are they building back there? They've been at it for a month with no change.
Him: They aren't actually building anything. They're replacing the soil.
Me: Why?
Him: Well, it's technically lethal. It has traces of arsenic and mercury in it.
Me: ... Sounds like a healthy working environment.
Him: Yeah... Here, let me get that bottle. Don't want it rolling under the brakes.

Makes me wonder why that was his worry about leaving a bottle in the car. =P

I have off work today and tomorrow and I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself. I don't really have much extra money right now. Bills are pretty tight and probably will be until next month. I am making headway on my credit card, though. The tax return should help when I get it. If I get it. =P I should know by Wednesday. We'll be doing our taxes then.

I think we'll be going out to a nice dinner on Thursday. I'm going to take part of tomorrow and pick out something really awesome looking. Maybe take a double dose of fiber Thursday night to be sure everything is gone. I'm definitely going to the gym tonight to get some cardio in and I'm hoping my period doesn't arrive until Friday. I'd really love to have a nice evening all around but mother nature does love to have her fun with us mortals. I wonder if she takes plea bargains.

Of scales and balances

125. That's my new average weight. It's really strange to me to be back in this place but with a new and more destructive outlook. What I've begun doing to myself to lose weight is worse than starving in many ways because my metabolism cannot possibly find a way to adjust. I practice some heavy restriction, forcing my metabolism to remain active and high but not taking enough to maintain my weight. My results are not as dramatic. They don't happen overnight, but my body is slowly thinning itself down to these new balances of low weight and high burn. I don't know that I'll stop when the times comes.

Maybe it already has. When I stretch every rib shows in stark relief and the only reason they don't when i stand still is because I have firm skin that won't sink around them unless pulled. Well, it won't sink yet. I'm getting there. Even my face, which never thins, is thinner. Everyone thinks I can't maintain my body weight because of a high metabolism. I eat regularly now. It's the eating disorder no one will ever be able to spot. I'm too good at what I do now. Too experienced. It's so easy to cut out the fat in my diet, to drop the heavy protein and skip the carbs. It's too easy to get away with, because I am, and no one, not even my husband, would guess it's intentional.

I'm such a bitch. This is a selfish, stupid disease. It's not even a disease. It's an obsession. A phobia of being fat. I'm completely responsible for what I do. I'm not saying everyone with an eating disorder is. I'm saying I am. I know what my nutritional choices herald. I pick and choose what I know will help me get that little bit skinnier, that little bit more skeletal. My husband is trying to eat healthy. It's child's play to steer him towards low fat, lean protein, greens, no breads. These things are healthy for him, but unhealthy for me. I make them unhealthy. How sick is it that I've even found a way to corrupt nutrition to be counterproductive?

I'm so torn right now. I'm in a new cycle of self-destruction, but I feel guilty for what it may do to my husband to worry for me. I know he worries about me. I know he'd love me if I were a whale. I know this, and yet I can't let myself be fat. I can't let myself be healthily thin. I'm borderline too thin for my height now. 5'7", 125, mainly muscle. I haven't done my body composition in a while but I think I'm around 8%, if that. Too low for my frame, anyway.

This post doesn't have a point besides organizing my thoughts on "paper." Paper is too dangerous because it's a physical record. Electronic storage is easier to dispose of if the situation merits.