got an international phone call that completely brightened my day. so unexpected and boy did i laugh.

thank you for calling.

snail comes back today and i should really clean the dishes, but at the moment at least, i haven't got it in me. i did take all the dishes out of the sink and bleach the sink, though. so, that's got to count for something, right?

sitting here, hiding from the sun and listening to "plans" by ida. thinking about the fan that turns and the way everything's turning around me.

if i didn't know better, i would say i was lost.

talking about what i want to do with myself, how i want to be, it makes it feel both impossible and possible at the same time.

finding that i need to somehow find this great courage within me, or maybe just start to believe in what i hope for. when jason wants to achieve something, he just acts as if it's already the case. jason gets everything he wants, and i wonder if that is his secret.

how, though, do you start acting like you are beautiful or interesting or talented when you don't believe these things at all? do i really have to begin some sort of great self-delusion to become beautiful or interesting? how do i do that?

it is for these things that i am at a total loss.

thinking more and more about moving to portland. knowing that these problems i have, they've all to do with me, so there is no escaping them. very worried that if i do leave here, i will be abandoning the support system i have, so when i fall deep into the well i'll not be able to find my way out. i'd find myself in the deep and the dark and that soon i'd disappear completely. and though daydreaming of disappearing is what i do best

i am afraid of losing my voice and then losing my form and then just being gone.

i once knew a man and he lived in a single room. and the quiet of his voice, i took for gentleness. and the sadness there i took for poetry. the softness, i took as a gift, a beautiful centering thing, when we talked it was the only time i felt myself become still, a stop to this spinning confusion that whirls inside me like dead autumn leave on a windy day, not having a pattern or end. i felt blessed for that stillness, it felt like understanding. but i think, now, that he merely lost himself, and that when we talked, it was a great effort to throw himself into interaction. an exhausting and disquieting thing, his world becoming undone just as mine was coming into focus.

i fear that if i drew up four quiet walls around me, i would, too, completely lose myself in that singular world. convince myself that that was my life, and more, that though the bright light of other people is warm and comforting like lying in backyard grass as child, it is the dark where i really belong. because to find yourself in that glow and then have it taken away is a pain akin to feeling your heartbreak over and over and over again. to have your seams pulled apart. to be disassembled and forgotten parts.

but

if i did move away i would get a chance to prove myself brave, to go out on my own, to go to shows, to force myself to talk to people.

to force myself to make friends.

give myself the chance to do something really great, which i fear i can't do here.

there are too many ideas about who i am and what i can do

too many stories and understandings of me that i am feeling the weight of.

not that the stories are untrue or the ideas uninformed.

but what a great freedom to reinvent yourself to be exactly as you desire.

i am getting a clearer vision of this desired image everyday, and knowing that i do have the freedom to do it, regardless of geography and external expectation, is terrifying. and wildly exciting.

something like the cliff jason explained to me once, in our old apt, sitting at the kitchen table over late dinner and catching up, sartre running through his head.

knowing that you can throw yourself off at any moment, that the only thing that's keeping you standing at the edge looking into the horizon rather than flinging yourself off to become part of the horizon: a simple choice.

i think about this all the time.

i dream about it too.

both the standing and the throwing myself off.