Favorite entries from older journals.
Get up out of bed.
Brush your teeth. Wash your face.
Put on clean clothes.
Eat a good breakfast.
Do your chores.
Keep yourself standing.
Take your medicine.
Do your lessons.
Nod. Smile. Respond.
Keep yourself standing.
And when night comes, get under the covers and wait for the sun to come back up. But stay.
Don't walk out the door. Your mind and the images and thoughts and disease it holds will have to come too.
Just keep yourself standing.
Don't scream.
Don't pick up that knife.
Don't get behind the wheel.
When the gray and white noise subsides, dust yourself off and keep yourself standing.
When the color and voices and sounds of the world wash away to noise, there is no control. A state where there is color that is washed out and anonymous. Where sound is continuous and chaotic. Where nothing makes sense and where there is no control.
And when it subsides, keep yourself standing and never try to explain. It was just a bad mood. Nothing to worry about.
Ignore the pain.
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The heat is stifling but I wrap the comforter even tighter around me. My face buries itself in the pillow, willing the spotted darkness to turn into unconsciousness. My hands and feet burn with the heat. They set fire to everything they touch. I can't breathe. I lift my face up an inch or so and suck in the air. I pull a hand up to my face and place it under my cheek. My face flushes.
I hurl myself into a seated position, still reluctant to cast aside the comfort and obscurity of the blanket.
A paw lashes out at my foot. The cats have been pouncing around at eachother for an hour or so. They become part of the background, only leaping into my awareness occasionally, to keep my restless toes in check.
I don't feel like playing so the paw disappears once again. Just part of the noise.
The clock says 2:33. How familiar.
I finally throw the blanket aside and begin to stalk along the living room floor. Back and forth. The heat of my body is becoming unbearable. I feel as if my blood is fire. Pulsing hungrily underneath my thin skin.
I stop at the window and grasp it, opening it violently. The cool, crisp air rushes into my lungs as I gasp for it. The fire retreats, becoming part of my fevered thoughts once more.
My elbows rest on the sill, my head in both hands as I watch the cars zip by. Just flashes between the trees. Highways don't sleep either, I guess.
I finally leave the window. Tear myself away from it and the view. An image has started again and I can't bear them so late at night. The edge of the balcony. A leap. Floating. That wonderful air rushing past. And the ground. Always the ground and always blood. Fire. Blood. No difference.
No, that doesn't make sense. I believe it, yes, but it's very late. Things are easier to believe in the dark.
I curl up in the chair closest to the open window, listen to the movement of cars and wind, and I crack open a journal.
A journal with scrawlings, illegible and frantic. A journal that will never see the sun. It only knows stars and spotted darkness and this restless, exhausted figure made of fire and motion.
2:42. We've got a long way to go.
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I have stage fright when it comes to peeing in a cup.
I got to the place around ten and didn't have to go to the bathroom at all when I first arrived (I had gotten up at 8 and gone to the bathroom then. I'm not a machine!). So, I sucked down a bottle of water and a few cups from their water cooler, while reading about the exciting adventures of pregnant celebreties and Jamie Lynn Sigler's wedding (she's the chick from Soprano's, if you really wanted to know.).
Their magazine selection was very sad. Not only was this US Weekly, but it was an old one. An old and bad magazine, among other older US Weeklys. And I forgot my book cause I'm a loser. Looooser.
Anyway, I finally got up to try, about a half an hour later. It was actually more complicated than it should have been. Had to wash your hands with a special soap and dry just enough and then watch as he got the kit out and emptied certain things and then told me all about what I'm supposed to do once I'm in the bathroom.
I may not be a doctor, but I thought I knew what I had to do once I got into the bathroom.
Apparently, it was important that I didn't flush and that I filled the cup to a certain height and didn't wash my hands in the bathroom.
I almost flushed, I tried to wash my hands in the bathroom (but the water wasn't turned on) and I filled it higher than I was supposed to.
I am such a bad pee-er.
ANYWAY, I also have stage fright. It took about 5 minutes of sitting on the toilet for me to go, even though I all of a sudden really HAD to go. But my bladder was like "Oh my god! Their going to be looking this time! We have to do a good job. I want this pee to be perfect! Sparkling! C'mon, kidneys, work with me here!"
If I ever have to go to the bathroom in front of someone, I'll probably explode before my body allows it.
My god, this is the best journal entry I've ever had. I should talk about pee and peeing in a cup and sitting on toilets more often.
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On one of the roads I travel frequently, there are two mundane trees, that both reach over the road, almost as if bending toward each other. During the day, they don't really catch the eye. They blend together with the houses and the other trees and the cars and that same old view most roads will give you without fail.
But at night, they create this pocket of inky darkness, and all you can see are the top branches making their almost complete arc and making that black fathomless hole in the middle. The streetlights are spaced apart from it, just enough, to create this illusion.
I love to drive through it at night, because just as you enter the trees and there's still that trick of light, still that complete and utter blackness, it feels like you'll be transported, just picked right up, sucked into the blackness and spit out on a different road, in a different place, a different time. Maybe all of a sudden it'll be day and your stereo will be blaring and someone will be sitting next to you in the passenger seat. Maybe a few years will have passed. It feels like a portal. Like a split between time and place and distance. Like a curtain that's been hiding a new path.
I love that moment of anticipation I get, that moment of excitement and hope, that irrational thought that fleets through my head, before the same old road and same old houses and same old circle of my life comes through on the other side. It's like opening a closet door and having a small voice in your head hoping to see Narnia, instead of shirts and hangers.
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Ghosts do not have relevance in the world. They're not a solid or contributing presence. They're transparent and drifting, left only with the power to remember. Filled and made by memories and shadows of a past, unable or unwilling to add on or write anymore of their story. Ghosts feed off of other people and their energy and life, hungrily and desperately, wishing that that reality and that story were their own.
Ghosts are only stories, incompleted or barely started, wishing desperately to make some kind of connection with the world, to continue their tale, but almost always falling short.
Some will haunt, unable or unwilling to share the details of their existance but still filled with that raw need to express it. So, they hang around others, hoping someone will ask or connect, but fleeing the moment one does. A vicious cycle.
Most ghosts are just afraid and frustrated. They're like the people who will call a friend and hang up when that person picks up. They're like those who will make imaginary plans when a friend asks them to go out one night. They're like the people who will remedy the conflict of distance, who will push you away while desperately needing you near. They do all of this because as much as they need and want the connection, they're certain it can never be made.
I don't think death is always necessary for their existance.