when i feel like this, like a transparent shadow, or maybe a figure made of mosquito net, in the middle of such bustling commerce, it's almost as if i can see through my own fingers.
i come home at night to an empty apartment and it's like i never left the midwest, where my only visitors for 5 months was a girl from austin and a boy from ohio and neither of them stayed for longer than 2 days.
and both times i got drunk until i could force myself to sleep with a stranger in my home, the next day coming like fire across the surface of a tissue, my brain half functioning but hyper aware due to the interruption in the long chain of alone moments that made up my life.
i was telling anna last night that i got so used to living almost entirely internally, that i had built a cocoon around myself so tight that i am still not used to being back in the world where it's ok to talk and it's ok to tell secrets and more than that there are people around who will listen.
maybe it's because the people that i do that with are still on the other end of a phone line, jason being wonderful for company and really one of the sweetest people i know, but not one for midnight confessions of long hidden thoughts and hopes that you are afraid to name.
maybe my time in the midwest was just a kind of trial by fire, a way to learn that that is just how life is, that no one really opens themselves like that, no one really connects, that life is alone, and this is what i am, and that i should learn a way to spray paint my exclamations on my internal walls only, learning painfully again and again that this is how i am, and how i am to be.
or maybe i just need to get to bed at a decent hour and give myself a chance to process and prepare for the next day.
all night i dreamt about having dirty hands, but not being upset or ashamed over it.
