i'm so sad! about what, we don't know. giving up on the idea that this relationship can be enough, maybe, but i can't even quite tell you what i mean by that, and even if it's true it's not the whole of the thing, just an irritant for the nacre to crust around. i miss C. i keep trying to invest things (school very lately, other things also) with meaning that i don't really, in my heart of hearts, believe they have; but how can you put real energy or work or hope into a life that is pointless? so maybe trying to believe in things is the right course after all, even if it is a deluded one.
how often do you have to be asked to a thing, and stare at the messages wishing so much that you felt you could go, or even respond—this is the safest warmth going, probably, you aren't going to get a better invitation, so if you can't manage this what hope have you got? Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. you will keep disappointing people in the same ways, again and again, out of fear.
girlfriend is flying back to the east coast for a taiko convention, apparently—a little after valentine's day, not that that means anything. (B used to humor me in observing these things, and where did that get me? nowhere any better than this.) anyway once upon a dreamier time i would have tried to make that into something, maybe; would have thought, oh, i've been thinking wistfully about visiting j., i wonder if the two could be combined, maybe we could all get dinner or something? but where i am now is i learn something like this in passing and my heart lifts its head wearily like an old dog and then slumps back down again: there is nothing for you here, heart, nothing to get excited about. don't get your hopes up.
i am meant, i suppose, to stay centered in myself, and invest in myself, and, and, and… none of which feels possible or useful. nothing can grow here: the earth is salted. tempted to go to domina and say to her, how do you exist in this space that is meant to be sanctuary but makes it so bruisingly clear that we are never expected to be there in the room? i shopped a course on gender & sexuality in ancient greece yesterday; i might even take it. but how do you deal with being told archly, oh, for them it was perfectly normal to love both women and boys! unlike, you know, those freaks who do that today. and then in another class, talking about greek lyric and how much of sappho is reconstructed and saying, well, sometimes we have to supply gendered endings, so they could be male just as easily as female! so important always to prevent heterosexual erasure. why are these people so clumsily careless with our feelings, our selves? why do they get to be? and this is where i'm meant to seek balm for my bruising.
there is so little that's good in my life; and the small sweetnesses that could be nurtured into growth, i'm afraid to engage with & inevitably kill. thumb black as mood. how do you tell depression from a recurrent grinding hopelessness, a future you can't see or believe in, fits of crushing misery that come over you like weather? i want, so much, to be happy. (audacious declaration.) i keep clutching at things i think might get me there, and finding i don't get to have them after all, or else they aren't as solid, as nourishing as i thought. like that raccoon in the video, watching with helpless bewilderment as its cotton candy dissolves ungraspably into the water.
i want to curl into the side of a person i love, some safe harbor that doesn't exist, and lie quiet there. warmed, unscrutinized: that sounds like as much as i can imagine of happiness.
