I dreamt last night that you came to me in a warehouse of a home, of big open spaces and oversized hearths where the birds lived in with us and the trees grew from the floor within corrugated metal walls and rough-hewn oak tables. You came to me with three bracelets of bronze, gold, and silver stamped with messages, only one I recall. "3 yrs" it said, like a promise. "Three years," you said, with a beaming, and genuine smile in your face. By a grand hearth of stone wreathed in a garland of winter greens, lit by the glow of a large fire we cant feel, we stand. "Three years?" My heart swelling, relief flooding though I didn't understand. A face I haven't seen and a voice I haven't heard in longer than I care to think. "Three years we've been together." Your eyes soften and I still don't understand because we haven't been together, we've been apart exactly that long and my mind races as I search for something I've missed. The truth I land on is that I am with someone that isn't you and guilt shades my face. Not guilt for you, but shame that I am the world to someone else that I don't love as deeply as I feel you. Tears come in torrents and are made more painful for the love I've allowed recognition and release. I rush into your arms in equal parts fear and jubilance. The truth that I settle into your arms with, the truth in the familiarity and rightness of you and your name and your love, the truth that I surrender to is that it is you, it always has been you, and it always will be you. My heart tears in my chest and my throat shrivels, my breath is sand and my mouth hangs wide as I remember what I have to say to someone now behind my present. As ever, I weight the scales in my mind with what is good and what is bad, even as you whisper through my hair and into my brain "I've waited for this, I thought I could never come back" - words I practiced in my mirror at home, in my car, in my mind as I worked all the days I was not with you. The scales creak and groan and screech their protests, the one man against the other, and my heavy, tired, sluggish heart is turning to sludge, and somewhere in the hollow of my spirit that we call 'soul', a stirring is felt and my mind bends to the stir. I feel it. The calculations and the weights don't matter, the past and the present don't matter, and the feeling and the fear don't matter. My body slumps down into your arms and I say "I am yours at last. The truth against everything is...I can't be without you again". And as with each morning, I wake, short of breath and full of fear that turns to sadness as reality seeps sleepily into view, crushing my heart. drama.

I have to go back to the beginning. They ask me "What do you want to do?" They stare at me. They wait. They think I'm wishy washy. I am. Is the truth the worst assumption someone can make about you? I am young, and I am passionate. I am practical. I am impatient. These are my flaws. And the reason I hesitate when I hear "What do you want to do?" or "Where do you want to be in 5 years?" The truth may be the worst assumption you can make about me. Honestly? I want to be married to the love of my life (where ARE you?). I want to be financially stable enough to be thinking about children. I want to be happy. Do I have to be a designer? No. I think all I have to be is a creator. Of something. I have bitterness and resentment in my heart that I need to let go of. Both old and new. It lies like a stone in my chest, the weight of it growing heavier each day. I have become jaded, cynical, and increasingly dissatisfied as the years have gone by.

It has been a whiile. There is a house. With a little blue door. And it sits in a wheat field in the early dew of a fall morning. Insects, aglow with the morning light, drift lazily about like motes of dust in an ancient library. This house was built by hands; the kind of hands that belong to a self-made man who dreamt it, built it, lived in it, loved in it, and left it behind. It is a simple, country-style house built in a time gone without machines or shortcuts. Stunningly back-lit by a brilliant dawn, I see the sunlight shoot through smudge windows of the house from back porch to front. The whitewashed clapboard pleasantly peels a bit around the edges, from age or disuse, inviting my hands to come and care for it. To restore it. The empty rooms sweetly ask for purpose and objects and people and feelings to fill up its spaces. I am filled by the bittersweet and melancholic yearning of the house that is not a home and it is me searching for purpose and me needing to be fulfilled and me reaching out and filling the head of a stranger with possibilities and plans. It is me calling out, swathed in glorious morning sunlight, a beaming beacon of hope and promise for the future. Memories of past inhabitants and failed little attempts at home begun within me, in the heart of me, that were abandoned not quickly enough though I yearned for what they represented. For what I could represent. I am saying "please" and laying myself bare. Look to me.

Great change came and it went, with a much-a-do hullaboo about it. I moved. The most difficult and financially draining process of my life. Emotionally exhausted, I moved in to a studio further into Queens and have found it surprisingly lovely. The neighborhood is nice, the commute is quick and nearly painless. I am close to everything I need.

Still haven't gotten a better job, but I'm working on that - well, will be working on that now that I have some free time again. When I say some free time, I mean very little of it.

Love is difficult. As always. This is somehow (I know how) worse than ever before. Let's be more honest than usual and still not as honest as 'completely honest' and say that I am not happy and I once again feel stuck in a situation that doesn't seem to be getting any better no matter what I try to do. I'm at the point now where I just want to grab someone by the collar and scream at the top of my lungs all the things I want to say, but dont (because nice people don't say things like those). It's incredible how people can ask one thing or another of you and not take their own advice into account.

I need to get my priorities straight. If I'd had them straight to begin with I might not have moved to new york in the first place. I don't think I've ever said "first things first" to myself, so maybe that's part of my problem. Following my gut when my gut is wrong.

I have realized that this blog is really just a place for me to house my latent negativity. I'm glad I don't push this on to other people. At least I don't think I do.

Well, I am pushing it onto anyone who happens to read this. Which I'm positive is no one. Which is probably for the best.

How did I fuck things up this much? The weight of everything is making me literally sick to my stomach. I came up here to build a life, without a clear plan for my future, hoping to fly by the seat of my pants as I always have and hoping for success to come my way. But money and love and lethargy barred my way.

And now I am once again on the precipice of great change. There are a couple of ways this could all play out.

A week or so ago I was so sure - I thought I had convinced myself I knew what I wanted - and now here I am wondering what I should do. Again.

What is there here for me? What can I feasibly afford to do?

What do I really want?

What is going to fulfill me?

When am I going to stop being indecisive?

If you have to remind yourself of all the reasons you should be happy, it defeats the purpose.

Still trying to get my life on track. I signed up for sewing classes, and I may try to find some more things I can take - a business class or two. I don't know. I'm trying to work towards this goal I set for myself and I'm already getting impatient.

I've an offer I shouldn't refuse to go back to Texas and work towards grad school from Dallas. To be fair, instead of outright refusing, I made massive pros and cons lists. The cons still outweigh the pros. I can't go back to Texas. Not now. I just need a better job and things will be better.

As far as my personal life, things took a strange turn - you know those moments where something very small happens, something so tiny it almost doesn't feel worth mentioning, and then moments or hours later the actual weight of what happened sets in? The great Dane Cook calls it 'brain ninja'-ing. This guy I'm dating and I are very culturally different, and I was forced to deal with it head-on for the first time a few days ago. On the ride home, I just kept thinking "where is my simple little life?" Why can't he and I just run away from all of it and be together without worrying about who will see us or who knows or who is saying what. At what point did I sign up for everything being so damn difficult? A lot of things come easily to me, but this is ridiculous.

Sometimes I feel like I need a therapist if for no other reason than to help me organize my thoughts. Maybe to also help me from going professionally stir crazy.

My capacity for optimism amazes me sometimes - not to toot my own horn or anything - but for someone who hits lows like the one in the previous post, the slightest upward turn in things and I am back on track.

I have a LOT I need to work on - I mean, A LOT - but things are looking up in at least one area and that optimism is bleeding into everything else, breathing new life into my resolve. Which is always a good feeling.

Bring it on.

I'm at the point now where I am having dreams - no, nightmares really - anxiety attacks while I'm sleeping - of "getting my stuff back". That whole shenanigan when people have to exchange belongings that they no longer share with one another. I need my things back, but somehow in my mind, that is when it will have completely sunk in. The fact will have sunk in that I did everything that I could do and still couldn't allow myself an inch to creep back to him. The fact will have sunk in that I lost friends and time and opportunities for almost 3 years for something I clung to with every last ounce of emotional strength I had, hoping against all odds that it would work out - that at some point, all the bad things would go away and all that would remain were the good things, the great things, the things that kept me there so long in the first place.

I have nightmares - seeing a representation of my former self with him as my present self goes to collect my things. My outrage at finding him with someone else, even though I am with someone else. The double-standard of "how dare he?!" and "who does he think he is?". Honestly, I hope it fucking hurts. I hope the pain of my loss kills. I'm not that lucky, not lucky enough that karma will be a bitch for all of the wrongs done me in the past years.

I deserve to be happy. To be loved, To be cared for. To be protected. To be cherished. To be desired. I used to think it selfish of me to want for anything. It is selfish, love is selfish, but not in a bad way. I counted my new relationship as a blessing because the interest this man showed in me and the extent of it gave me the final clarity I needed to say "enough", to say "if you can't be this for me, then there are other people who can". I didn't ask for much, I don't think. I asked for time. I asked for affection and attention. I asked for commitment. What was readily given me in the beginning was withheld from me for over a year. I made life-altering decisions partially based on the strength of that old relationship and everything that I poured in, all of the effort that I put forth to make it work and make someone else happy ultimately was for naught. They say that surest way to find happiness is to make others happy. That didn't work for me.

It seems to be working for me now. Like a big, glorious Band-Aid it's working for me. All of the resentment and anger that beat the love out of my heart have been quelled for the most part, hidden in some small corner out of sight and mind. But it's times like these, when I am alone with my thoughts, that it creeps out and makes me feel as though things are still unresolved. It scares me and haunts me. I fear that if I ever have to face him again it will just come ripping and tearing its way out of my chest - and there I'll be, the happily-masked husk of who I appear to be that was finally consumed by the pain in my heart. He could be happy. I won't know - and that thought burns, not only because I won't know how he feels, but also because it is very likely that he is happy or happier without me.

It's been a year and it's time to reflect.
I'm not sure I've really changed too much. So many conditional words in there...
What have I learned?
*people are not who you think they are no matter how well you feel that you know them.
*no matter how much you believe in yourself, it takes someone else's belief in you to make things happen.
*belief alone will get you nowhere
*assumptions are dangerous in any situation
*happiness may very well be a myth. temporary content, however, is a complete reality.
*love doesn't ever work out the way you plan for it or hope for it to.
*hope alone will get you nowhere.
*actions do indeed speak louder than words, and leave more lasting impressions.
*feminine charm will get you nowhere.
*sincerity is easy, convincing people you are sincere is hard.
*fear is the the catalyst to failure.
*do not spread trust thin, place it in only partially in the few and the worthy.
*love does keep an account of wrongs, and it will bring it to you in a double-spaced, bulleted list with categorized sub-headings.
*negativity is not rewarded. positivity is not rewarded either.
*if you master nothing else, be a master judge of character.

My dreams have been empty for some time now. The last dream I remember heralded the end of a chapter in my life long before the end actually came - and here I am on the precipice of a new one. I am looking for a new apartment, I am fumbling and fucking up my way through a new relationship, I am searching for a a way to get my life back on track - emotionally, physically, professionally, mentally. At this point, if it wasn't already obvious, I am just feeling drained. I'm coming about of so much heartache and broken-ness. And maybe that's from working nights 5 days in a row - or maybe that's just my general feeling about things. Whatever the reason, I am fighting the urge to run away from everything and take some time to re-group and recoup. I don't think that is necessarily what I NEED, but it is the easy thing to do....well, not easy, it would involve a lot of high-stress situations coming to a head and ending a lot of things that have barely begun, but I'm getting to the point mentally where I just don't even care. I've separated myself from a lot of familiar things and I'm afraid of moving forward even though that's is what I desperately want to do. I've forgotten who I am. I've not given myself time to create and do. I've not allowed myself any time to connect with myself, with my creativity. I need that part of myself to function like a normal human being. Right now I feel like a stranger in my own world.

new home

I'm in unfamiliar territory now, for the next year. The choice was my own and something that I felt I needed to do while I am young and less cautious or else I might spend the rest of my life wishing I'd taken the risk. New York is a world unto itself. Hell, Manhattan alone is it's own planet. I made the decision to make this long white hallway into a home with a bright and beautiful blonde who keeps me laughing and let's me rant and goes out for drinks after a mediocre day at work. She likes my shitty cooking and watches bootleg tv with me every Sunday. I'm glad she's doing this with me, I can't imagine what it would have been like to change so much in so short a time on my own.

It's been fun planning out the apartment, choosing colors and making art together. The joint efffort has made this place into something I'm proud of. Now comes the part where I force myself to be done with it and decide to be satisfied so that I don't start to accumulate things I dont need for the sake of having them.

Work sucks, and there haven't been any opportunities to do what I'm really here for...but September is the month. I have much still to learn and a lot of confidence to muster if I'm going to do this.

I'm back to dreaming blindly with stones under my head. I always turn to dreams when things get hard or different. They lead me astray in the best way, warn me of the future, and reveal the flaws I don't see in the daylight.

But now I'm back here in the place where I was raised, sipping wine with my mother and idly flipping through thousands of channels with nothing to watch. No stones, no dreams, no desire or need to sleep just yet, a million indescretions rolling around in my head.

I need to start keeping count, then maybe you'll see for once that I am right about all of this.

This room has the worst energy. It reeks of laziness and lack of care. 3months of living hasn't pulled the suitcases off the floor or dragged the clothes out of them. The radiator hisses and clicks like some angry reptile and the world rumbles and shakes to the fourth floor as the thousand subway cars pass underneath.

Life continues on outside in machine forms, horns and motors and generators, busying themselves with routine. If there are birds other than pigeons, they don't sing. But I sit here staring at this pale screen, aching from long walks and the tension of the city.

This place is a cesspool.

There is so little kindness.

I need help finding light here.

A pile of papers several inches thick sits patiently, gathering dust while I ignore them, each and every. They want signatures, answers, type-written hot air and bullshit scribbles to fill their voids. They want to be packed in tight next to cheap parchment and ink stain stuck to the others in a brown package. They want to be sent to the four corners on gasoline driven winds and into the skeptical critical analytical clammy hands and chubby fingers of those who wait to rip it apart.
Those who muse and peruse and huff about it until they come to a decision.
Worthy or not.



Somehow, I don't even care about that. I can't even sit self-conscious and anticipating the rejection or the approval to come. I don't even think I need them as an out anymore, don't need their excuse to leave. I just want to run away, run far and fast and scream from my toes and rip up the roots tangled around my legs.

That's not an unreasonable request.

A Re-occurring Dream

"You're pronouncing it incorrectly," they said, grinning at me in a kind way, but one that made me uneasy. "The emphasis is on the 'U'."

I knew this to be ridiculous. I'd always heard the word 'pendulum' pronounced "PEN-dyoo-lum" and never as these two crones described. They hunched over in dirty vinyl lawnchairs outside of a cart laden with shining, tinkling, fluttering things that (if one had to pick a single, encompassing word) could only be described as "trinkets."

One had wild red hair that seemed to be past the point of washing, and the other wore a peppery-grey updo that had clearly been slept on and ignored for an unfathomably long time. Their clothes were a jazzy compilation of colors and patterns, fading and feathering in delicious dissonance. Their faces were pale leather and their eyes were only dark holes. The sockets did not make me as uneasy as their smiles, sweet and good-natured in the folds of their faces. They were more wise than I would ever be.

I fidgeted, not wanting to continue the argument but unable to shake the need I felt for the object after which I inquired.

The Red one reached in her pocket and pulled out a porcelain ball muttering something about wanting to get a closer look at me. She popped the ball in an empty socket and stared, lidless and artificially in my direction. Her mouth twisted up so that her lips disappeared in the grimace until finally - "Aaaaaaah," she breathed slowly.

She smiled again.

The eye popped out and she handed it to the Pepper companion.
"Have a look-ee," she said in a low voice.
Pepper poked the eye in, twisting it and making adjustments until she could "see" me.
"Hmph." Was her only reply before she pulled the eye back out with an sickening 'pop.'

She turned back to the cart, pulling out a drawer full of little boxes of different colored paper. Feeling about in the drawer, her fingers closed around a tiny green one. Red's laugh burst the silence and she clapped her hands three times. "Perfect!"

Pepper gave what would have been a side glance at Red had they possessed eyes and turned to me.

"You asked for a pendulum," she mocked my pronunciation. "But we know you need more than that...so consider the other things as gifts. You have a very long way to go."

Green box in hand and a few dollars short in my wallet, I left the cart and the women at my back. I don't know what else was in the box, but the pale orange pendulum was warm in my hand.

I'm at home tonight listening to the muted thunder outside my window and wishing it wasn't always so hot in my room. 2 fans and the A/C running and I wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

I have daydreams of a tiny house with the bare minimums, painted a sunny yellow in a kitchen full of wildflowers. Daisies, buttercups, blubonnets, Indian paintbrushes. The kitchen is spring. The den and the hearth are heavy colors dark and warm like harvest foods and soil. The den is winter. The bedroom is inviting and tragically beautiful, old furniture I have given a home and junk made into beautiful things on the walls. A four-poster squats in a corner draped in ochre sheers. The bedroom is autumn. The porch is open and faces west and the sunset and it absorbs the luscious green glow of summer's dusk. The porch is summer.

I also wonder a lot lately about human behaviors. In particular the urge to hold things that hurt us. Not just in a literal sense, but in an emotional sense as well. We seem to have a strange incapacity to move on from things and people and places that bring us that bittersweet melancholy feeling. I don't know why we do this or for what purpose, but I still wonder. And I'd like to stop doing it if I could.

She sits alone, kneeling on a richly stained oak floor. She is facing a mirror, large and round with scalloped and curving details. The mirror hangs in the air silently floating, small threads of glittering tendrils wrapping around it and in every crevice.

Brushing the surface of the floor with her right hand, she pulls a large knife from it. The blade is razor sharp and from within it, a humming metallic buzz whispers. Without ever taking her eyes off her reflection, she grabs a handful of dry and tangled red hair in her left hand. Slowly she raises the knife to the hair and sends it slicing through each strand as if it were made of water. No resistance. She relishes every infinitesimal snap as the follicles of every handful are severed, never taking her eyes from those in her reflection.

When she is through, she is surrounded by the remnants of her hair. A circle of red. She holds up her right hand and where there once was a knife, there now sits a flat circular rock. She breaks her gaze with the mirror to look at the stone. She has a memory of choosing it for a purpose. She remembers the first time she saw it, underneath the small corpse of a bird with yellow and grey feathers. No eyes. She remembered that he'd had no eyes. She had taken the piece of earth from beneath him and thanked him, though she didn't know why. It seemed appropriate at the time.

Shifting from her memory into the present, her eyes return to her reflection. Her shoddy hair, unruly and uneven, and the eyes that stared back into hers so diligently in spite of their dark and heavy lids. A moment or two passes and her eyes begin to lose focus staring through the mirror, seeing but not seeing.

A sharp and unwelcome music pierces the silence and rips its way into my dream.

Jason Reeves 'just wants to write me in a song' at 5:45 AM.

And then I woke up.

The clock is counting down the fifteen minutes until a production meeting for the year's first show. I'm assistant costume designing with another girl. Calling her Hellen would be apropos.

I should be excited about the beginning of my senior year in college, but I'm not. At some point, maybe I was. Maybe I wanted to come back to this obnoxious blue and green room, but a thousand reasons discourage me.

I've been dreaming of blue and yellow flags, long, and forked like the tongues of snakes. They rise on steel flagpoles from a shallow pool of the brightest aquamarine in the middle of a barren and dying pasture under a cold sky. I watch them from a very tall wooden house, an aging structure with whispers of the Tudor fashion in the remaining details. I am perched on the unstable railing of the balcony and the wood bends and groans under the pressure. I'm not afraid of falling.

A fumbled and messy ritual, a long and peaceful silence, the vibration of a phone, the slam of a door and lumbering footsteps across the floor. This is not where I want to be.

I sit with one hand on my keyboard, the other holding a drink I can't really stomach. But I sip at it anyway, taking as much of it at a time as I can, hoping that at some point I will have it all. This liquid burns my tongue and throat as it goes down, wanting to be consumed but punishing me for wanting it so badly. I can't help it. I want it not for the taste or the appearance, but for the result. If I can persevere to the bottom of the glass, it won't burn anymore and there'll be no rumble of protest from my stomach. It will go to my head and warm the backs of my eyelids, steady my breathing, envelope my limbs like a blanket. It will raise the volume of my voice and peel away a few inhibitions, or it would if I wanted to speak or mingle. Or at least that is what I hope. It could turn out like most others of its kind and disappoint, either by not being strong or to little of a good thing. It could want to free itself from me, no, I'm sure it does. This one is different, one I'm afraid I won't finish. Or it could be one that is worth the struggle to the last drop.

I've resigned myself to reading and pretending I'm not waiting for a call that I suspect won't come.

TEN:
10. You're creepy. Creepier to me than I think you are in reality.
9. I think about you a lot.
8. I feel like you're fighting the urge to leave more than this town when you go.
7. I totally understand how you feel, but even if I'd known that we felt the same way a long time ago, I still wouldn't have approached you, you're annoying.
6. You guys fucked me over a lot this year and if it happens again next year, I will use any opportunity I have to let you know, contrary to my character.
5. You made me this way and not a day goes by that I wouldn't love to berate you for it.
4. Please make me feel like I matter to you. You don't realize how little it takes for you to show me that I'm not wasting my time on you.
3. I'm fucking terrified of the next few years. Mostly because I don't know what's going to happen to us.
2. Get better social skills.
1. You don't know me at all.