but now i am self-conscious to even put on my scarf, because there is a strange vibe floating around here since new boss came. everyone is really concerned with appearing pro.

she was very nice to me this morning, she came to my cubicle and asked me how my weekend was, and then proceeded to not listen to my answer

but it's all well enough she didn't, since all i managed was a weak "it was good...good, thanks"

last night i cooked dinner for my brother and his friends and they seemed to really like it, which was nice

and when i finally went to sleep i had very violently emotional dreams involving my first best friend, the one i was best friends with from age 5 through 15

i wish i could remember enough of the story of the dream to say why it was so emotional and angry, but it was

and while i was dreaming of yelling at her and whatever else was going on, i was whimpering and talking in my sleep and i woke myself up.

and my face and pillow were wet with tears.

i guess right now is a time of things from long ago coming up from my unconscious to replay themselves over and over.

some recent, some very old.

i wish my underneath wasn't holding onto these failures and shameful fears with such fierce desperation.

i barely look at myself in the mirror anymore and when i do i can't really make out the shape and lines of my face

my green eyes appear grey and they are red around the edges, my forehead is always crinkled up now, like i am thinking really hard.

i am waking up with my teeth smashed tight together, i am waking up with neck pain like when i was in school

everything is tightening up and dry.

i imagine myself disappearing from myself. being covered in windblown sand like abandoned mining towns in the deserts of africa

the color and the lives there swallowed by the passing of time, the fact that at some point, someone lived there, and it's the absence that makes it lonely; as if it were uninhabited its whole time, the emptiness would be less.

i've been having daydreams of alaska again, of a house far away from everything with books and music and stuart and maybe a dog too. a beat up truck and a straw cowboy hat.

a computer to give me access to more music and books

letting them pile up the walls to the ceiling, and creating mazes with the stacks

writing letters to create some semblance of human contact for myself, but burning them in their envelopes, so i can disappear.

a garden in the back, maybe i'll learn how to fish.

build my own easel and use my computer to get paints

sleeping in paint covered clothing, with sticky paint covered hands

mostly, though, a canopy of trees and a bed on the back porch, to watch the sky push through the leaves

listening to my breath and starting with that for proof that i still exist

let myself become a ghost, thin like a shadow or a forgotten photograph

and just forget everything for awhile.