heartbreakingly slow.

i have had 2 phone calls today.

and i have said a total of maybe 20 words.

it's still freezing in my cube, and i am just waiting, counting the minutes until i can powerdown and go home.

i'm sitting here and i am thinking about all the holes in this place

and i am thinking about other people and how well we put up our mime-glass-boxes

it's fucking amazing

and everyone i know is lonely, everyone i know is sad

even the ones with lovers

even the ones who talk about being free

i keep getting pulled back to these thoughts, these specially worded phrases that jason and i would throw back and forth across our lake merritt kitchen table while we watched the kids walk down the steep hill to the macarthur bus stop.

he'd say "and then he said that we are all free, and that, jessica, THAT is the terror, that we could throw ourselves off this great cliff at any time. there is nothing but ourselves and a decision between standing on the ground and throwing yourself off."

and he'd sit back and look very satisfied.

but i would mostly look at my fingers, the nervously bitten ends, the cuticles that were split from fidgeting worry. it wasn't my class, afterall, it wasn't text that i studied at all. i hadn't sat with it in class, or had to write on it, so it hadn't sunk in enough for me to say anything about it really.

besides, as close as jason and i are, we never had those talks.

but i always remembered the idea.

last night jonathan and i talked about feeling like you are going insane. i watched the smoke curl up through the low light in his basment, blue and soft, like dreaming. he kept his eye set on his linoleum board-thing for his printmaking class. he nodded his head and made slow deliberate cuts in the surface, green plastic being pushed off by the blade. i could see his jaw flex, it was in time with mine. he picked up his cigarette, an ash a mile long, he didn't even look at it, he just inhaled and went back to his cutting.

i listened to lonely cello and empty voice, and let the minutes slide by, thinking, wincing beneath the weight of it at times, the amazing gravity of my inability to connect or speak.

i wonder if everyone feels like this. i know there are other people who do, it's not as if i think i/we am/are alone. what i wonder is if everyone feels like this. suppose they do, i guess that means that i should have more compassion.

but why doesn't it also mean that i should get fucking pissed off, too? because if we all feel like this, why is nearly everyone a fucking prick?

maybe we're all pricks because we feel like this.

and because we're afraid.