08 III 2002 - 17:47 - prex2

Sometimes, brevity is a good thing. During those times, of course, my tongue disconnects itself from my brain, so that it doesn't disturb anything, and begins to babble of its own accord.

It's probably a good sign that I'm back in the land of capitalization again. Punctuation and capitalization lose themselves too easily as far as I'm concerned; capitals are for discourse, when I want to be heard, but lowercase is for the times when I want merely to have spoken.

I still ache from last night and a hundred others like it; no, I'm not trying to use guilt against you, Tiff. You don't read this that often, as far as I know, and I disliked myself long before you came around. I don't like it but there it is, the one constant in a life of relationships like sand. How many people do I have a healthy relationship with? If it turned from an unhealthy relationship to a good one, how long did it last? (Example of the latter: I had - have - a friend from first grade through eighth grade and maybe to now. When we were both depressed, it was great. We could cry on each others' shoulders. Then she got better. I'm happy for her, but we've since drifted apart - true, it's also because we go to different schools now. But I'm thinking it didn't have to be this way.)

When you don't read this and I felt the things I say before I met you, how could I use guilt against you, here?

Everything I do is colored by guilt or a cast of sorrow or desire and sometimes odd combinations of two or even all three. I'm sick of it and I'm sick of not knowing what the hell I feel. I can't will an end to my adolescence, though, and perhaps it's for the best. Some say that I'm doing painful growth now which will later come in handy but I don't feel it now and I feel like a freak and I am still the terrified child I used to be, just in an infinitesimally bigger body. Sorrow superimposed on desire and desire superimposed on sorrow leave very different tastes in the mouth. I use strong words but until I come to something stronger I will continue in this. Prose needs its vigor.

I don't want to look at other people and be reminded of how I don't measure up to what I think I should be. I really don't. But how can I help the comparisons? I'm sure they're unhappy in some way, too, feel they don't measure up in some way. Here's the thing: I don't live in their heads. I can imagine that they are content.

For a long time, I was unhappy with how I looked because I wasn't white, wasn't big. I'm not so sure that's stopped although it's surely a lot better now. I will always be small and, barring a sudden spurt of dedicated weightlifting, which, yeah right, rather lean. Body image, wish I felt all right with my own, but it's always other people who are better, never me.

And I look at my classmates, and it's always the outline of their frame under their shirt, their arms, veins wending a course through-over taut skin, pale muscle, ligaments and striations making themselves known. Arm fetish, you say, Bill? Perhaps. Either way it's easy to kindle desire in me. It hurts, you know, in its own way, when you look at yourself after that. I know what I find attractive and I'm not asking that I should suddenly want to clone myself, just that I could accept that I could ever, ever be found sufficient.

I've spoken before, I think, of how touch and smell are so important to me, of how I want to be enveloped in both...

So give me a measure of peace and give me the purpose, the wholeness that I crave, and then we'll see from there.