Don't Ask For Me at Midnight
I want right now for every fucking thing to just blow up. I don't mean buildings, but I am full of tension. I want to be done and try again with the car and the writing and not feel like I have all this baggage on my person!
Those makeover shows are killer. She's found her confidence.
I want to find my confidence.
Where have I put it?
I don't know, but I just don't want to care so much about being afraid. Panic-stricken. I don't want to be struck by anything anymore. I want to have the strength I think I do have on the table. I want to have something to accept and I want to have something to refuse. I want my oeuvre and my design and my world and have it move outward into you and yours.
I don't want to be here forever, or in analogues of this world, these beautifully papered but still confined walls.
I feel like I'm going to be going back to Gateshead after taking my shots at Lowood, taking my licks. There is no place where I'll be on my own without some kind of system behind me.
There's so much that's happened, but really, damnit, there's so much that hasn't. I want to make things happen, but I feel like I've lost those raw chances and I have to manufacture everything now and cobble it together and you can't just tell the universe that you're lonely and tired of being alone, you have to say all that with the caveat that it is OK. And it has to be okay or you're one of those people who can't make it, one of those half-formed unborn who despite will and intention and the careful intake of iron, just can't take those loud noises.
You don't want to let the world give you a syndrome, but it will, by virtue of its dirty air and rusty nails that fly by night as if they're mosquitos, hurt you. And you can't tell it no. It's so much bigger than anything you've got to bear on the matter.
I want a terrycloth robe and a Lionel and a life behind me. Here's the thing: I want to give details in my writing, I want to breathe through writing, cry out in writing, sing out as Anais requires, but all it has ever seem to do is alienate everyone and everything I've got hope in.
I want to tell you that I haven't driven for four or more years. Not for more than five minutes at a time. I want to tell you how I've been...I can't even put it in words because it is so...shameful, so off. So not what other people are doing. Even Atwood says people like me are freaks. But at the same time graduation is so soon and I will be moving home, back to Gateshead, stark with the absence of childhood, stark with the color of dreams deferred, and I will have a job and and have a bus ride everyday and I'll buy a movie now and then, order a cd online, write when I'm not otherwise occupied and basically wait to dry out. I'll be hung like the lavendar, completely calm, dripping what was good into the air, a soporific, crush me and apply me to your temples. I want to tell all. I want it to be found on Google, I want it to be trackable, I don't want to hide. I want national TV coverage of the waste of the past 21 years. If not the waste, then the deep gaps and rivets. I've only be been able to keep up because the lily-pads have been close together, but when they start spreading...someone's going to realize I can't swim. And I can't, for a fact. I can't tell you, but I can ask you to imagine, I can ask you to think of what you find weak, or sad, or better yet, what you find good and abundant in yourself, and there I have nothing but epsom salt, nothing but nitrous oxide, eucalyptus and a gaping, oozing sore gangrene without treatment.
Please, tell me where to go and if I can...I'll try and get there.
God, what am I going to do?
I really want a breath of fresh air.
