I had been doing pretty fine, at least I thought so, dealing with the breakup as of late. But then I started once again thinking of him, the ex. I dreamt of him a total of three times last night. In one of the dreams I kissed him. In others we were just doing things together. Then I emailed him, breaking my no contact rule. And going back on what I said about ending our friendship. I then started the email off by saying that I would like to talk to him. Yesterday I felt as if I missed spending time with him, and doing things with him, just hanging out with him and stuff. And I dreamt that I was doing that---wish fulfillment(?) and then I woke up wanting to talk to him. So later in the day, he obliges me, and IM's me. We talk, but I was afraid to see him in person for fear that I might be mean and snippy and sarcastic, or just sarcastic and not quite mean, but that it wouldn't be a comfortable situation. So I declined. But as I was walking past Social Sciences where he works, I stopped in to pee. And then I was like, nah, i won't go and see him, but in the end my curiousity and want of his company prevailed, and I went to see him. In the beginning it was awkward because he had all of his walls up. But after a while I had fun with him, and I think that he had fun too. We joked around and talked. But there is still some sexual tension. He touched my hair, I touched his, he sat close to me so that our knees were touching and I felt that same tingle that I felt before. And it sucks. It has dimmed a little. But it is still strong. The only reason I think it has dimmed at all is because I want it to, so that we can be friends, and I am ignoring a lot of the tingles and nervousness and all of that, and just being calm cool and collected. But I know that he felt the same thing by his reactions to me and the way that he acted. And then when we hugged we both had a lot of restraint. More than last time. But I still touched his hair, which was a no-no. I just patted him on the head quickly. But I was about to touch it. And I felt bad. I stopped myself. Then we parted ways. And I went the opposite direction and he went the opposite direction, but he looked back to see me when he was leaving. It is all so confusing feeling all of these things. But I know one thing, we are not supposed to be together. That I will stand by.
Confusingly yours,
Once Again
Dana
Today was an okay day. I stayed in most of the day. Until around 3 or 4 pm. I ate breakfast/dinner/lunch then i went into my room and wrote a couple poems. One called Love, another called Blue Boy, and one called The Queen of Hearts. I also worked on The Fiend, my short story which I haven't worked on in ages. It has potential but needs a lot of work. I think my writing has improved drastically.
Dana
Hello Journal
I am here once more to spout nonsense and bullshit about love and life that I hardly know if I mean anymore. Today he gave me back my doll. I meant for him to keep it. I feel like he is erasing me from his life. I need to erase him. I can't though. I don't want to give up "us." I enjoyed the time that I spent with him, and I want to remember it, not wash it away. I realize that he was "for" me, but not "for" me to have for a long time. It taught me a lot being with him. Taught me that I deserved more from a man than I had expected. Meaning more respect, and more consideration, and better qualities. He had a lot of good qualities...that I would like to find in someone else again, but with stability and sanity attached. So he has to be stable and sane. Or she has to be stable and sane...or whom ever I love next has to be stable and sane. I won't take anything else. :) Anyways...I wrote a poem about Sylvia Plath. I want to post it, but not quite yet.
Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Until the morrow
I shall wait.
To see you again dear journal
my one love
You will be missed.
"Sylvia Plath"
Dear Sylvia
sometimes the world is cold
and the ordinary becomes frightening
the tragic
becomes mundane
a girl falls down the rabbit hole
quite like Alice
and locks herself inside a crystal palace
the world is topsy turvy
road is curvy
never straight
the world becomes a show
you become life's audience.
a woman loses herself in small moments.
losing sight of the big picture.
the beekeeper becomes the kept
words become inept
and all is never as it seems.
Someone deems your pain a nuisance
a condition of your emotion
an ocean meant for only you to drown in
You wish the weights wouldn't pull you down then
they blame it on your condition
the complacency within you listens.
A man you love is now who you thought he was
behind the peach fuzz
he takes off his mask
and gives you a kiss
Every woman it seems does adore a fascist.
The villagers never liked to pry
and even after you stab it's fat, black heart
the thing just will not die.
It watches while you sleep at night
and eats your sleeping thoughts
it lounges in your tightening throat
and all the words get caught
it mixes with your hate and fear
and turns in on itself
it takes your conscience by the ear
and pulls you to your death.
Do not cry,
Dear Sylvia
I too sit too long in silence
and stare longingly at my wrists
I make myself a new monster
with each new catalyst
I pick apart my problems
and cry along the stairs
I sometimes create problems
when none are even there
I over react
I dramatize
I feel so all alone
Dear Sylvia,
Dear Sylvia
You're not the only one.
I wrote this a couple nights ago, thinking about things.
"evan"
I looked into your eyes and
thought I saw something beautiful
i thought you were fragile
like a butterfly
like if I touched your wings
you wouldn't be able to fly away
i wanted to wrap you up
and protect you from the world
and yourself.
I sat contemplaing things you had done
or said
that rented space in my head
and would not leave
i wanted to build you up into a fortress
to keep the world out
Mommy and Daddy lying stranded in the moat
at least I'd hoped.
I wanted you to be your own person
to be free.
but selfishly I didn't expect your own person
to be a person
without me.
I wrote this that day when you melted down about kissing me with meatloaf breath.
Meatloaf
The sky is crying
And you are sad.
My heart weeps too.
The day is gray
like your eyes
the wind hurls itself against our bodies
we walk along the wet bricks
the broken bit of umbrella hangs down
sadly too
Your face is book-open
like I can see straight through your eyes
and the only thing visible is a glassy, empty sadness
All because you don't like meatloaf
and you don't like Meatloaf kisses
And I don't know how to take it
When you don't like me.
This I wrote the first day after we broke again.
Love is a Machine
There in the back room
a silver thing sits
it scrapes its feet along the wooden floor
approaching slowly it lifts it's head.
I lift mine as well
I feel a tension overwhelm
a bigger feeling swells.
The gears turn in my head,
and in his too
the logical assumption is
there's nothing left to do.
We step back from the moment
entranced in the silence.
Each look we give
each subtle glance
is quietly laced with violence.
There is no love here.
Never was.
Emotion was a wind
it stopped and stayed a little while
and then it turned within
it didn't want to stretch and curl
and wrap us in its arms
it turned us from two living things
and robbed us of our warmth
it made us into silent walls
staring at the sky
it came a while
and stayed a while
and then it had to die.
Posted by dana at February 10, 2003 07:14 PM
Hello, Journal
I'm back once more. Things are so odd. I took it upon myself to send the page "beauty" to my exboyfriend on Tuesday night. He wrote back to me, sending me a letter and two poems, which were quite interesting. I think that
they helped me to get a grasp on what was in his mind--although the shallow part of me still wishes we could be close. So, that was yesterday.
Him and I spoke online from 6:30 until 8 last night. We talked about different things. There is a great deal on restraint and holding back on both our parts where talking about us is concerned. It is too confusing. I still have to go my own way, and he, his. But I love him, and hate that it has to be this way. And wish it were different...like we'd met some other time, when we were more settled...all around.
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Another lonesome one for me. I can't say I've ever had a happy one. But it is always sad for a different assortment of reasons. This time I will try to be happy. Others I wallowed in it. Or, raised my phonebill to new heights calling people who didn't give a fuck, and were busy fucking other girls anyways. So, I am tired of all of that. This one, I'm going to lay low and do something for myself to make myself happy, money or no money.
Today was okay so far. I may be in school an extra semester. I am failing French miserably. I wish that it wasn't a requirement. It fucking sucks. I hate that I am failing at anything. But I seriously didn't apply myself. I got sick early in the semester and missed a class, which made me miss a quiz. Then after that I failed the next quiz which was the next class, because I had no idea what we were doing. And so I got to take it pass/no credit. Which I filled out the forms. But the professor informed that I am failing, which I knew, and said that in order for me to recieve the credit I still have to pass. I knew this, and I guess she means to drill it in my head. I'm seriously considering dropping it altogether and not getting my diploma this semester. I am fucking up at everything. And it is all too much for me. I may end up being here another semester. It fucking sucks.
Hello Again Dear Journal,
I woke up today with a clear and refreshed head. I had the strangest dreams. I had a dream within a dream. But in the dream that's most prominent, I dreamt I was in Africa, standing underneath a waterfall cooling myself in the water. I was almost naked. I woke up to be talking to one of my professor's about a book called Poets Unbound. I wished I could be unbound like the poets. She talked to me about the 1960's and the black power movement, and black poets, and then i woke up in another place. I put on my clothes. I started to collect my things, and then I was leaving. And I woke up. I woke up to my roommate in her bra, looking at me like she wished I'd die. But in my dream, I had peace, and serenity, and beauty, and home. Africa is such a mystical home place...the dream is better than the reality(?). I don't know. I've never been. But it gave me peace. And I felt my troubles rush out into the water.
I woke up thinking about love. I woke up thinking that I love a lot of people. I love my friends. I love my family. I even love people who for all I know hate me. I am in love with love, with the way it feels, the way it tastes, the essence of it. I am in love with love.
I want to find this all encompassing love, this thing that I would be swept up in. I let myself get swept up in the first thing that I found, without checking it out good enough first. All signs were go. But something was always amiss. And still I love him--very much so--even now. Why? Why can't it just disappear? Why doesn't it go away like a cold, gradually, instead of sitting and festering in my head like a sore?
I wonder what makes people love other people? What makes anyone love anything? What triggers that response in someone, what electric current, what smell, what taste, what sense, what place and time? I wonder and wonder and I don't know. Does anyone know?
Some people feel like they've got it all worked out. I'm not one of those people. Half of the time I hardly know myself or what I'm going to do next, or how I'm going to react to something. I'm not a psychic, obviously I can't predict the future...no one can...but some people seem like they've got it all tinkered out in their heads...and you're an impassive mountain in the way of their making it happen.
No--in many cases...no. Wait what am I saying. I don't even know anymore.
The dream was beautiful. It was peace.
It was a break from the cannibalism nightmares that have been plaguing me, the symbolized nightmares that have been prying at my brain for weeks now ever since we broke up and got back together. I dream of a house, dilapidated on the outside, and falling apart, but inside, and up the stair, all beauty, all beauty and light and shining gold and glass. Inside it is beautiful and I want to stay. But outside there is a monster in his mother's skin, trying to get in. A monster that wants to hurt him, but he doesn't even see it. And I don't feel his mother is a monster. Not at all. But sometimes I feel like she made him unsettled. And it makes me angry. And I guess the house is him, or how I want to see him, falling apart on the outside, but oh, in the inside so much beauty.
I have a fixation with beauty, especially when it is linked to tragedy and turmoil. Inner conflict and strife only serve to make me more transfixed on the way that something is underneath all of that "bullshit" or that conflict, and the painful things that no one wants to see--the way underneath it all, life and people are still beautiful.
With Greg, I thought that I could help him, and be a beacon of strength for him. (Me and my Saint complex. ) I felt like I could help him, I could be a martyr for his humanity. I felt like inside no matter what there was a good person in him struggling to get out. And every once and a while I would see glimpses of it...and it would reinforce my struggle. I tortured myself, I became my own death doctor and made lampshades of my own skin against the torturing conflict of words muttered in darkness and solitude. That imagery is troubling me...even as I write it. But my fixation lately on Sylvia Plath and her assertion that every woman adores a fascist brought that comment out of my subconscious. I wrote a poem to Dear Sylvia. I am in agreement with her. A fascist is a thing some women do seem to love. But when you put a stake in its fat black heart the monster will not die. He only laughs at you, and the villagers do to.
There is no beauty in pain.
Or is there, sometimes I think there is. Philosophically of course, only in theory. The person experiencing that pain does not see beauty, only the one with free time to muse over it, and question it's meaning, and it's existence...they get the beauty of it. So maybe pain is beauty to the people who experience it in the third person(?).
I called it tragic beauty in most of my poems. I thought it beautiful the way a trainwreck is beautiful. The twisted metal over twisted metal glistening in the sun, shimmering in light against the gray smoke rising in the the air. The moment is not beautiful. The thing is. The inner you wants to see the train crash even though you know that its going to be a horrible thing, its spellbinding, and you simply must watch. I guess that's the way it feels. Like a thing that you don't want to see, but can't help staring at...but despite your disgust at yourself, you find pleasure in.
What makes us do the things we do?
Why do you have to hurt so much before you find peace? Is anything worth losing faith, and once it's lost, can you get it back?
I always think that I see something no one else sees, that no matter how ugly and evil something is on the outside it can be beautiful on the inside. And sometimes the things people think are beautiful on the outside are really ugly on the inside. I guess that's the significance of the monster in his mother's skin, and the beautiful house within the ugly frame that's falling apart.
His mother looking beautiful on the outside is a monster. And he inside the house in solitude, the house that is ugly and dangerous and falling apart on the outside, sits in solitude within a place with so much beauty that the light of it blinds the eyes.
Maybe beauty is over rated.
I wrote this when I was having a tense moment with my boyfriend in the cafeteria. It was something wierd that happened at an event here called Converge. He got extra quiet on me and I was with my friend Stephanie, and he snapped on me when I was joking with him. So when we were in the cafeteria I just didn't know what to do or say. And I had my notebook and wrote this poem.
"More Machine Than Man"
the wheels turn
behind the cold gray silence
a kiss
laced with violence
falls against the forehead
man made machine
is born dead
fits of electricity bring it to life
the screwdriver's a knife
turning against the metal
against the ears
that cry for less
less turning
less scraping
less cutting against the grain
the thing has built a brain
I wrote this when I was in love. Here it is.
It's called
"Your Skin"
"Your Skin"
Crossed arms across chests
upon my heart
your head rests
downy soft in brown tufts
you refuse to cut
i refuse to cut off my emotions
making me vulnerable
to your pulling eyes
your hands against the rolling expanse of my thighs
pulling me into breathless sighs
against the ears
light falls differently
when my skin brushes your skin
it falls softly without shape
melding objects into objects
and me into you
white into black into light into gray
the mellowsoft sounds of your breathing
against the coarse pillows
and soft air
melts into the sighingsoft echo of a name
when I am skin to skin with you
I am reborn
into a place where time only exists in dreams
and forever is just a scent on your collar bone.
Hello Dear Journal...
I am back again. I was talking with my friend about some recent developments. My ex, He comes and says to me that he doesn't know how to relate to women. Then he says that he enjoys being with men because he doesn't have to protect their feelings. Then now he says to me that he doesn't want to have to worry about anyone's feelings. He says he wants to do the male bonding thing. He just wants to hang out with his male friends. He doesn't want to be in a relationship. And I thought at first he was a commitment phobe. But at that time it wasn't even in a true commitment. It was just us being friends with benefits. But then he didn't even want the benefits. But when we had sex he seemed into it. But I guess not. He doesn't know how to relate to me as a human being. So there it is.
I'll Miss Your Gray Eyes, But I won't Cry.
Bodies don't think by themselves
the rushing of blood I felt
didn't mean a thing
it only meant that my body
missed your body
that I wanted to feel you
skin to skin
It didn't mean that I wanted you to sink neck deep in quick sand.
It didn't mean that I wanted to dictate your life
and tell you how to tie your shoes
or tell you how to spend your time
or who to spend it with
or that I wanted to tie you up
and lock you up
inside a little box next to the bed.
It meant that I--
I what?
That I loved you once
I let my hands linger too long on your face once
or in your hair--twice
and my lips linger too long on your skin
three times too many
and my mind linger on your wants
and concerns
probably.
Probably that's what it means.
It means a changing of the guard.
My heart is no longer yours.
You didn't want it anyway.
And what good is it?
When you have none of your own.
I'm feeling less angry than before. I changed my post. I had said some pretty mean evil things about my ex, but I feel like no matter what his secrets are his secrets. So I am not going to let them out...for anyone. I'm sorry. But I just need to get out of this world sometimes. I wish I didn't exist. I wish I could disappear into the scenery and fade into the background of people's thoughts. I really feel like I wish that I didn't have to get into all of this emotional turmoil, that I could just sit back and relax and watch life, and not be an active participant--save myself from being hurt and confused and decieved. I feel decieved most of the time, by myself, and by others. I feel like I want to just relax and be free and be able to enjoy things. But I can't enjoy anything without taking it too seriously always. I think that I am too serious sometimes. I sometimes feel like I want to just erase people from my life. I guess that's how I feel right now.
I loved him. It was too soon to love though. I feel like I let myself feel things too deeply for people. It hurts me a lot. It makes me die a little inside each time I get disillusioned. I am dying a little inside now. Dying. Dying. Dying. I really feel like that most of the time--like I'm dying. My insides twist and turn and I want to collapse into myself.
Untitled
Cold hands
creep up my skin
a chill crawls up my neck
the zombie reaches with a tug
and flakes the skin in flecks
it makes a move for that thing
encased within my skin
my waiting brain begins to close
and hide the thoughts within
Today was interesting. I did avoid contact with my ex boyfriend Evan. Haha...If only I had his Social Security Number too. But anyways, I did avoid contact. I did continue to be a big hater of him. I did decide that he is mentally unfit to be a human, and I did act on that assumption. :) Well, maybe it did do the job for the moment. Ha ha ha. I'm really being bitchy about it. But hey. It's a part of the healing process.
Machines Kill
Machines kill
with cold eyes
they slice and dice and chop
when we kill
a soul dies
the crimsoned pressure drops
No one can stop
the heart that kills
and builds its shining walls
among the silence
pressure pops
a nagging feeling falls.
copyright 2003
Hello Again Dear Journal
We are broken up again. And this time I know for sure that it was not my fault. This journal is such a good thing, such a good catharsis. I am so glad that I have it. I need it today. Wow, life is so strange. I knew in a way, in my heart of hearts that once we were physical again, we would break up. sometimes I think it is the way of men. Or mabye it is the way of people. But nonetheless, I think way less of him now than i previously did. And I guess that is expected. I no longer want to even be friends as I so idealistically wanted to before. I really took a while to learn what was right for me, and what wasn't. But I think that now I will break myself out of my cycle.
I am so idealistic about love. I think that it is this all encompassing beautiful tragically moving thing. But with me it always ends up being more tragic than beautiful. I don't know what else to do with myself. I keep doing stupid shit. But no more. I'm done with stupid shit. I just want to be happy and have fun, but i can't find anyone to enjoy life with, and have simple fun with and companionship. That's what I truly want. But it's not working out that way.
Love is a Machine
There in the back room
a silver thing sits
it scrapes its feet along the wooden floor
approaching slowly it lifts it's head.
I lift mine as well
I feel a tension overwhelm
a bigger feeling swells.
The gears turn in my head,
and in his too
the logical assumption is
there's nothing left to do.
We step back from the moment
entranced in the silence.
Each look we give
each subtle glance
is quietly laced with violence.
There is no love here.
Never was.
Emotion was a wind
it stopped and stayed a little while
and then it turned within
it didn't want to stretch and curl
and wrap us in its arms
it turned us from two living things
and robbed us of our warmth
it made us into silent walls
staring at the sky
it came a while
and stayed a while
and then it had to die.
Yesterday was February 9th, 2003
I had been waiting for my boyfriend to come over and see me. Which he promised me he would. But of course he did not. I wonder sometimes whether or not any type of relationship is worth the trouble. What do you really get out of it? I don't know what I really get out of it.
I wonder why I still continue.
I sometimes wonder if all of my problem is that i choose the wrong people to give myself to, and end up getting hurt because i secretly want it that way, to prove that relationships don't work, because i"m a commitment phobe.
I don't know
Confusingly yours
Dana