Intensifying blah

What do you say anymore? Christ. You feel good, you feel shitty, up and down and all that crap. What the fuck? I can't stand schoolwork. I can't stand work work. But sometimes I do. I see my therapist and she puts things into perspective, which I hold onto for dear life for the rest of the week. Sometimes I'm fat, sometimes I'm luscious, sometimes the word 'earthy' hits me square in the face and sometimes sweat and flab and all the toxins ooze out. Sometimes I'm NPR and Glenn Gould playing the stock market, sometimes I'm nineteenth-century courtesans or horrorshow massacres or a gothic Beatrice in red pumps...sometimes that all disappears and I'm seeking solace in some cabin in the woods where nothing can touch me. Sometimes I'm all touch. Sometimes I'm nothing at all.

He likes me, he doesn't like me, does it matter, no it doesn't and yes it does. What do I want? What does he need? If I'm not my desires, then I am my will or can it not be that cut-and-dried, please and thank-you-very-much. Demon tongues and deli counters and claymation, Frank Zappa on Halloween, snow, pine trees, California beach and let's-not-repeat-the-same-mistake-we-made-last-year! and why oh why if I see so much of myself in Manny and Ben can I only manage a lukewarm respect for their story? What can get me out of myself, what gets me in, how do I retreat from the default setting, the rat race, the (to paraphrase) constant, constant, CONSTANT gnawing sense that I had and lost some infinite thing? What infinite thing? The notebook with short stories, the art class, the private piano recitals, the midnight bike rides...losing yourself in yourself and knowing that no matter how lonely you get, there is someone just like you waiting to tell you everything is going to be alright.

I'm so tired of talking.

Yours,

I


If I were a sequel, I would be...Elaine Robinson, post-Benjamin Braddock.