ithurtsithurtsithurts. i spit. it still hurts.

Heather and I
are not ladies,
sitting with our
legs spread wide
as a turkey being stuffed.
Heather tells me
I love like a dog,
eager and desperate,
even lick my wounds
the same sad way a dog does.

Learning to be patient and trusting of the cosmos and mostly of the goodness of people. Keeping my chin up and remembering all of the gems I have found and all of the gems I have yet to find.

Snow Line

It was wet & white & swift and where I am
we don't know. It was dark and then
it isn't.
I wish the barker would come. There seems to be eat
nothing. I am unusually tired.
I'm alone too.

If only the strange one with so few legs would come,
I'd say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.
Where are his note I loved?
There may be horribles; it's hard to tell.
The barker nips me but somehow I feel
he too is on my side.

I'm too alone. I see no end. If we could all
run, even that would be better. I am hungry.
The sun is not hot.
It's not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.

Lauren, Anna, and I are planning our lives together. And I have believe that some version of this plan will actually happen. This year I keep getting the sense that my life is starting, over and over again. I think, sometimes, that maybe I have never been so happy.

I keep finding niches that are full of love, and sneaking my way in. I keep finding new families and they keep making room for me and leaving for 4 months will be scary, I have this creeping fear that I am trying to release that my places in these niches are not permanent and that leaving will make me forgotten altogether. But Lauren and I keep talking about trust and how I need to learn to trust people more. So I am trying to trust that I am not as disposable as I sometimes suspect.

It is strange that a Freshman level, giant lecture can be the one that causes me to think the most, outside of class, and I am so glad I stumbled into this class. We watched a Jeanne Kilbourne lecture today, in class about ads and their affect on society and for some reason even though it was no surprise to me I felt certain things click. Through ads women are taught that they are objects, or at least that if they have sexuality, it is an object. Mostly we hear about how this causes women to objectify themselves and fail to talk about the flip side of this issue. Through mass-media and whatever sort of other things I learned that women are seen as objects and somehow or another got the notion that in order to be seen as a person, I had to shy away from any sort of sexuality. My inhibitions about sexuality derive from the fact that I assumed that if I embraced my sense of sexuality I would be simultaneously embracing my objectivity.

I am filing this under my list of tragedies, which is a list I wasn't even conscious of keeping until today, and a list that is not limited to strictly my tragedies. I keep being told this is hard but not feeling it, but today I am feeling it, and they are right, it is hard. and yet still, it is not sitting heavy in my heart, but airily floating around me. I am learning to function even when I am sad and I don't know what this means.


I keep doing this. Saying things in my head like "I am going away for a long time, and I don't know what this means." There are lots of new things, and I don't know what they mean. I do not someone to tell me that they know what these things mean, because they don't, not for me, and they shouldn't. I don't want someone to tell me that they were just like this in their early twenties because I feel like my experiences are constantly being undercut by me telling myself that my older cousins have already done this, that it is nothing new. It is new to me and I want to figure it out myself, with help sure, but not with "answers". I am tired of feeling unsure about whether or not my thoughts and feeling are valid. I am tired of keeping track of everyone and them not keeping track of me, so I am taking a hiatus, not just while in Kenya, but before that (I accidentally started this year, when my life started to slip a little more out of my grasp and it took all of my energy just to keep track of my own life).

I feel big changes and they have already happened, and they feel consequential and permanent and I don't know how I feel about them, but am not going to waste too much time thinking about it, since they feel un-reversible. Last night I had the strangest string of dreams, which I didn't think too much of until I told Lauren and then realized that my dream was laying out the situation for me, in a single scene. The details were strange. This is another new thing, me believing in dreams.
I am tired. I am already coming up with justifications for not going to work or school tomorrow and I know they are valid, and yet, I am pre-emptively feeling guilty for the decision to not go, which a decision I haven't actually made yet. I am going to bed and hoping for no dreams and hoping the wind blows my love/concern in the right direction.

I am listening to Recommendation on repeat, which is probably the maddest that I'll get. I rationalize everything that anyone does, because everyone has reasons for what they do. The problem these rationalizations usually make me less and less mad at other people and more mad at myself. I should know better by now. I should be better at these sorts of things and I should, once again, always and forever stop asking too much of people and ask a little more of myself. I want to leave and go somewhere more comfortable. Like Portland crammed in bed with my two cousins watching house and eating disgusting amounts of candy. I need heavy Welch enforcements right now. I am quaking in my boots about Kenya and about my heart and how I am getting older and stranger by the second and less and less like the tree. I am mourning everyone else's tragedies today, maybe because I don't have enough of my own or maybe just because I want to feel in touch with people again. I am always around if anyone needs me. It's maybe the worst thing about me.

"for you beautiful ones,
my thought is not changeable"

I've never been so busy that I don't have time to think about how I am feeling. And I want to know how I feel about that, but I don't even have time to think about that. It's probably best, I usually mourn the loss of things for longer than they deserve. Mom says I have to find a more positive way to give things their credit. I've been almost cut off from Milwaukee because I don't have proper time to stay in touch and because I don't have time to think about my love for all of them, individually or to write heart-felt letters. Actually, almost anyone who is not in direct contact with me seems to be lost temporarily, and always there is this little part of me worried that I am letting them slip through my fingers. I want to be in love with something or something to be in love with me, and maybe and hopefully Kenya is the thing, for now and then I will come back a little different.

I am usually so busy swallowing everyone's lives, because that is how I get to know people and mostly what I want to do is get to know people, but suddenly my own life is too filling.

This school year started with a whirlwind. I can't get it to stop. But for the last week my body has been begging me to take a chance to mourn the losses of summer and of now. I seem to have impeccably bad timing in people's lives. Maybe I am not flexible enough. and I am certainly not patient enough.