"Although you don't believe me you are strong
And darkness always turns into the dawn
And you won't even remember this for long."
- Yo La Tengo, "Tears Are in Your Eyes"

If you were going to drive through my mind right now, I think it would look like flat, grey terrain. I talk to my therapist in circles and analogies and it puzzles her.

Yeah: I got a therapist. I used to use E2 to vent about the men in my life, even knowing that some of them would read it. I still keep a paper diary but it's full of cross-outs and angry words. I miss that every time I heard a new song, I used to film a little video in my head. I got ideas for stories and movies that way. I haven't written anything fictional in ages. Over break I had a couple of dreams in color, with lots of sound and people. I miss it.

I waste all my creative energies thinking of ways to humiliate myself for poetic effect. I am not making this up.

A couple of nights ago, or maybe it was last night, I stood on the front porch with a handful of boys. It hit me that each of them had either kissed me or tried at some point within the last three or four months. It's something. I wasn't that kind of girl in high school. That is, I couldn't meet the eyes of boys, and I couldn't flirt with them. Now I flirt with everyone; I think my vocabulary is limited. In my ethics class we talked about asceticism. I have always been obsessive, but lately, my obsessions are things like my ego and self-hatred - both at the same time. Thoughts that are very small and evil and circular. Words that don't transform but instead distort the truth. I'm very, very alienated. I'm also very, very self-centered. These are not unrelated phenomena. I keep meaning to look for volunteer work in the community. I am really, really tired of looking at my life so often and with the same dull vision.

One of those boys bought me ice cream on Friday and a movie ticket on Saturday. He assured me that if it weren't for those things he would only spend the money on alcohol. I make a better mistress than Lady Liquor, I know. Mistress indeed: He has a girlfriend. I'm older and I've been down this road before. I don't know why I don't know better.

I don't ever do my homework. I wish I were intellectually exhausted like everyone else seems to be this time of year. I don't even know how to begin to get that way; I just can't see.

I have all these fantasies of running away.

I run into my ex's ex every now and again and this sends me into spirals of thought and guilt. It hit me that when I'm in these spirals, I never worry about the fact that I hurt her; I worry about being that kind of person - the kind who runs around with other girls' boyfriends. I worry about what people think, not about what they feel.

I worry about my body. I am somebody's grandmother already. Bitter and self-pitying and nostalgic and talking all the time about food and pain and pissing. I went in for a blood-sugar test the other day. My mother was talking me down from my terror that I am hypoglycemic or even diabetic. (Terror, because I've never had health insurace in my life.)

I wrote to my ex this afternoon about some of the things I want to let go of, including my obsessive, selfish attachment to him. I'm even OK (I think I wrote this) with not being friends with him, if that would make him happier. So. Since then I've checked my e-mail even more obsessively than normal and gotten nothing. I hate it that this bothers me; that would defeat all I said and all I genuinely feel. I am trying not to hear too much in his silence. I know what it means when I retreat, however.

Spent most of the sunny weekend indoors, knowing I was wasting my life and my youth.

I pray. I meditate. It takes a lot of work, once you've forgotten, to learn to live in the now.