Feeling: every single adjective. everysingleone.
Listening to: Evanescence: "It's only in my mind, not real life. No, I must be dreaming."
Reading/Watching: Fellowship

It is so damn late and I should be in bed by two hours ago because I have to work eventually and it's not the sort of job where you can drag ass and how long have I been winding up so tightly like this and why did no one tell me?

Bri does it best. She gave me an incredulous look when I insisted I was "fine" and said, "So why do you look like your lower intestine is knotted around your esophagus?"

Apparently, she's been wondering why I'm not fine. Her friends have been wondering why I'm not fine. The night we went bowling? They wondered. Tonight, wandering Wal-Mart and eating dinner at my favorite restaurant? They wondered. And they ask Bri what's wrong, they ask how I'm doing, and she can't answer because she doesn't know, and figures she won't ask because I'll say it when I'm ready, except I don't know.

All I know is tonight I wanted to go swimming. Bri and I put on our swimsuits, and went to the pool near her apartment, and I dove right in, closing my eyes and feeling the water swell in around me, feeling my hair fly past my ears and float in an orb of tangle, and two thoughts chased each other in my head: I want to stay here forever.

And, in response to the above, Whoa, now that's fucked up.

Because suddenly, in my mind I was in the rain and I was dancing and I was in the shower and I was singing and I was in the bath and I was crying and I was in the pool and I was drowning. I have the weirdest love-hate relationship with water. I love it, I adore the ocean and lakes and rainfall and showers and I joined the swim team (the only athletic activity I've ever partaken of in my entire life), simply because I love how the water feels running through my hair, and I nearly drowned myself (what was it, fourth grade? fifth?) because the water felt so good and I wanted it to close around me and swallow me whole so I'd never have to rise out of it again, never have to breathe and with that breath choke back everything that's been drowning me without benefit of water.

I have a love-hate relationship with everything intense in my life, I realize, because I simply cannot bear the risk of loving something without a safeguard to protect myself from losing it.

I find myself doing it, trying to think of all the reasons why I secretly hate something that's consuming me, so I can ostensibly cope with its loss. I imagine giving up music for all time, cold-bloodedly picture the sterile hospital room where they remove my vocal cords entirely, or shatter my eardrums. I pretend I'm never going to write again, that my words are banal and wasted and of no use but to pull out thread after thread of ugly from myself, as if the wellspring will ever die, instead of renewing with each word. I tell myself all the flaws within everyone I love, dig fingernails into the cracks to pry out every pebble of annoyance and shortcoming, to convince myself that they don't really matter, they can't, because I'm an independent woman and I don't need them, not at all, I can just float off on my raft and disappear into my private ocean.

Then I turn the fingernails on myself, and the raft begins to leak and I'm drowning again.

I give myself excuses for why there is no excuse. It's all twisted. I say over and over why the thing that is making me cry is silly and ridiculous and shallow and how I'm silly and ridiculous for caring so much, and cycle back and again, always twisting.

I feel like a playground swing, the old rusty rubber kind on a pair of chains, creaking and rattling as it winds up higher and higher, doubling it on itself again and again, until you are stretching the last atoms in your toenails to keep a grip in sane earth below, unable to bear the sickdizzy release that will hurl you out of your seat and send you crashing down.

There are times I'm better than my demons and times I'm worse, and tonight I came up out of the water shivering. The rivulets running from my hair were indistinguishable from the tears that I couldn't even explain to Bri. I just propped my elbows on the side of the pool and cried and cried as I tried to explain the twisting.

I told her of college plans and stupid jobs and the trouble with a-year-from-now and merged into sequential flat tires and unfolded laundry and sitting on my toilet seat last Sunday morning at 2 a.m., sobbing and expecting my bed to be empty when I returned to it.

I can't expect the twisting to stop until I lift my feet. I have to remember that something stronger than me is holding me up, and that no matter how I twist the chains, no matter how they cyclone me back, they cannot break. They will spin me around until I'm right again, and all I must do is let go, let it be righted. I am afraid to lift my feet. I am afraid He cannot hold me up.

It's a silly fear, really. Who else was it that pulled me out of the bathtub that day?

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