four days later

where are you? why won't you call out, wave your hand, act like you want me here in the first place? even if you don't, just act like it. you beckoned and i followed and maybe i shouldn't have, but i did. i believed you. please don't prove me wrong.

__________

lately it's hard for me not to end up accidentally drawing all over my hands. right now i have a backward J squiggle on my right ring finger in black pen and a divot of blue ink in the center of my right hand. i don't know how this happened, since i'm right-handed, but i don't ask questions. i just find the marks hours later and can't remember how they got there.

__________

the weather is my version of perfect today, breezy and slightly cool, high of 75. i left the window open last night and woke up this morning so pleasantly resting under my covers. i slept flat on my stomach all night, the pillows bunched against the wall at my head, my ankles resting on the end of the bed.

today's pleasures: a new, clean vinyl shower liner; my black stretch skirt from Express; shiny hair; berry smoothie, no fat, no sugar; oatmeal raisin granola bar; taking the time at work to write a 5-page journal entry.

__________

now i'm starting to feel like you're pitying me
so let's talk about something else.
{my finely feathered friend J.}

__________

tonight's the night, and i'm hiding my heart under a bushel because i'm not sure what kind of situation i'm walking into. childlike excitement never serves me well. i'm usually so much more excited about things than everyone else, and then i feel like i'm wearing a Big Bird costume, awkward and too yellow and clompy. and everyone's thinking, tone it down, spazzo, tone it down. and i'm thinking, where is all of your passion??

__________

the last person i expected to see, and the past suddenly seemed so much smaller than it did when it was the present. i realized that i may have overreacted 4 years ago. i pulled the soft jersey of my dress down over my knee. i shook my hair out, that nervous gesture i don't think anyone really recognizes for what it is because i take great pains to make it look confident and brusque. i touched my face. my eyes, focused and unfocused, staring down the rows at the city street beyond.

__________

has a door opened that should not have been? i don't think our circumstances were tragic enough to make future encounters horrible, and i'm glad for that. what do you feel? i wrote to you today - maybe i was too much myself. maybe i haven't changed at all since then, since we ________, and the inundation will be overwhelming. i'm so tired of receiving so little of people, of being given a packaged and polished version. i want the real thing so badly that i give the realest part i can without taking my clothes off.

at the same time i always feel a part of me is veiled, the swirling of my words and the acrobatic movement of my voice stirs up a cloud of i'm me but i don't want you to see because what if you don't understand? so i'm standing still, barely clothed, at the eye of a storm i've made myself, at the eye of what everything means, lonely and unseen.