deconstruction zone

today, after much procrastination, I've begun to dissolve my belongings. the idea of getting rid of everything would seem like such an enlightening process, a certain freeing venture to simply trash the bits and pieces that help me remember who I've been, sell what I can and run. it's going to be a lot harder than I thought. the first drawer I opened I found dried roses from jorge's memorial service, an empty coke baggy, and a bunch of letters I wrote to jon but never sent. I've got a dresser full of skeletons, and I can't take them with me. if I've been in a cocoon for the past year, and now is my time to re-emerge as a different woman, I don't know how to manage the remembrance of my past. is it necessary? maybe I should just say fuck it and make a bonfire on the street corner full of duralogs and dog-eared pictures and movie stubs and incriminating journal entries written on cocktail napkins and stained shirts that my grandma darned for me and everything that will ever remind me to miss anything. I know this all sounds a bit melodramatic, but christ, isn't it? stuff, it's just stuff, bullshit stuff I've been dragging around with me. half of it I haven't touched in years, but having it safely jammed in the dark recesses of a cabinet makes me feel better. it's proof, it's evidence. it's morbid to think at all, but if I met some tragic and untimely end in a freak accident or even a rather ordinary one that you might skim in the obits and think to yourself, "thank god I didn't ride the n train that day", and someone were to excavate my living space, what would they think? what would they learn? what secrets and unturned rocks would they pore over? 5 years of important papers and pay stubs and unpaid bills in various heaps and a trunk full of diaries, half finished art projects and moldy coffee cups. sequined hot pants. complete discographic collections of bright eyes and britney spears, respectively.

without junk, I feel like I'd be nowhere girl. but then, say my house burned down? I would survive. I would survive without 700 dried up nail polishes in a purple caboodle I got in 7th grade and a stack of 40 photobooth strips. even rationalizing through all of these frenzied thoughts doesn't make sense to me. this must be why people get tattoos... no matter what transpires, it's marked forever.

I'm currently toying with the idea of a giant cursive "L" on my forehead. somebody shoot me with a xanax blowdart, please.

leaving, well alone

I'm not sure if my summer cold is a manifestation of all of the shit clogged up in my head, or a hangover, or both. likely F, all of the above. at any rate, I just went down the street to thai place for some tom kha soup to cheer myself up and just ended up burning the shit out of my tongue. things at home are terse, the boys are on no uncertain annoyed terms with me for reasons I am too anxious to analyze and almost every time I see jon I am unable to resist the urge to pick a fight. why? I suppose it must be for the adrenaline rush of emotion, a testing-testing one two three of whether or not he cares enough to engage in such juvenile silliness with me. we are not friends, we are not lovers, and all of the good memories haunt the hallways, eerie intangible remnants that send me spiraling into aching reveries with daily frequency. I'm addicted to beating myself up and jon is my favorite battering ram.

it's hard for me to be alone... there's always something stimulating me, keeping me from examining myself. a tv, a phone, a stupid social networking site, a bar, many bars, boys, work, etc. jon was my main distraction for 6 months, and when we finally made the real break (after a lot of waffling around and waking up in the wrong bedroom more often than I woke up in my own), I filled that space with more impertinent, inconsequential crap. here's the rub: I need to learn to be by myself, sometimes. not all the time, just some of the time. I never write anymore, I hardly read, all of the things I used to enjoy feel bothersome as taking the trash out to that piss scented crack alley behind the bar below. (christ, I sound like that rolling egg prozac commercial, but it's true.) I feel like I need a soul enema.

to be single is one thing, to be alone is quite another. I have no romantic prospects for the first time in years. jon cited one of his main problems with me as an inability to trust because he knew that before I had made a career out of juggling a collection of love interests, an art I perfected after my first nuclear heartbreak. well, there I was, a reformed woman. I was most certainly on the shelf. nowadays, hookups don't make me feel liberated or fulfilled, but rather empty, sad and skanky. next time I am tempted, I am going to remember that feeling, put down the jaeger bomb and go rent a movie and paint my nails with zebra stripes.

I am twenty-three and I have no idea what the hell I am doing. I went to AA and just ended up hitting on a gay guy and returning with some pastel pamphlets that I hid deep in the recesses of my dresser. I've been waiting for someone to get me outta here, already, turn me around, show me the light, put some fire beneath my arse. I just figured out that that person is me.