but I'd trade the rest of my days for you tonight

first sunburn of the year, slow to develop, just a little glow on my forearms and face. riding bikes by the lake with my lost friend's little sister and talking about loss and love and hurt and growing up.

my heart aches. there's so many holes punched in it that I imagine it like lace, gushing and leaking inside my chest. maybe that's why it's beating so fast. 85 bpm, unrelenting, like new love, like stage fright, like being chased down a darkened hallway in the night by the wolf from under the bed.

where is my brave face. where is the script for me to follow. what is love. can I love without trusting, or is that just addiction to oxytocin and dopamine and a very specific bioelectric field.

when I was little my mom used to make me pray for a husband. now I can't imagine anything other than living and dying alone. even when I'm with someone. when nobody's going anywhere. when they're right where I need them. I'm still alone, because there's no hope of anything other than loss and loneliness and broken shattered pieces of my lacy hole-filled heart. when did I lose faith.

who broke my heart first. my dad. jesus. the world. I remember being 13 and telling myself that there was no such thing as love. losing my virginity in a tent in the woods to a stranger, before ever even having a first kiss. because nothing is special. nothing is pure. nothing will last.

tomorrow I give in to the dark side. I lose the mission. I cease to keep the faith. I go to a psychiatrist and I get pills to quiet my heart. to put me to sleep. to make being unwanted hurt less. to keep my brave face on. to live through this.

everything sticks in my throat. pills. raisins. toast. resentment. fear. maybe I'm choking on love, on insecurity. on being unable to let go and trust. to surrender control.

I first heard this song the summer of 2003. the first time I lived alone. me and the cats and a sixpack of high life writing in livejournal, bike rides to the food coop, to decleyre, to the felix house. honeysuckle and porch swings and blue shadows on the street. sitting alone in the dark listening to lucero, loneliness like a knife embedded in my chest. surrounded by love but unable to open my arms and take it. like tantalus in hades. pushing the rock of my own stubborn lack of faith and hope and trust endlessly up this hill.

so I'll swallow my pills until summer, until the earth tilts, until things make more sense. until they are better.

but it won't be tonight.

I really wish I could go back on meds, that they'd work. that the side effects wouldn't be just as miserable as my baseline state is.

weeks of unending dopesickness has left me sure that my neurochemistry is irrevocably fucked.

I've read that crippling depression and anxiety are part of "secondary withdrawals," that it's going to be another month before I feel anywhere close to normal, which is way too close to rock bottom for me anyway.

I'm losing friends because all I do is whinge. I can't stand myself either. I can't stand feeling like this and all I can do is stick needles in myself and take handfuls of valerian root and drink lemon balm tea and wait for my heart to stop pounding.

I'm at wit's end. I've been having a panic attack, unable to stop crying for 3 days straight.

strong at the broken places

after two weeks off Vicodin I was stupid. I took a few pills when I had cramps too bad to walk, thinking surely it wouldn't be too bad.

instead I triggered another set of withdrawals all over again. fish-flopping limbs. racing heart. searing pain, like sunburn under my skin and on top of my muscle layer. hallucinations. nausea so deep it felt like dying. icy sweat.


I've been pushed to the very deepest darkest places this past month. I've been in more pain than I ever thought I'd be able to bear. I had to relive the whole Second Chance experience over again, being locked up and in pain and being treated like a liar. being forced to kiss ass and make nice to get out and get back to my life when inside I was seething with rage because no-one would help me.

and yet I go on. like a good little Newtonian. at some point these experiences will have their equal and opposite reaction. I will learn whatever it is I was supposed to learn from this and I will make myself its master.

and eventually this world will get tired of breaking me, and it will kill me in the end. even then they will gather after over the pieces of me that are left and say, she was so strong.

see you at the crossroads

It's gonna be awhile before I can write about the past couple weeks in any sort of depth. bad reaction to Yasmin had me feeling like I'd been set on fire, my MDs decided it was narcotic withdrawal despite the fact that I was taking 60 mg a day of hydrocodone, I went to the ER, got sent to the state mental hospital, went 8 days without seeing the sky or riding my bike, got out, had Howard Brown fire me as a patient because my health problems are beyond their scope of practice, one of the nurse practitioners there somehow gave my therapist the idea that I was a narcotic addict so now she's refusing to treat me, Howard Brown refused to refill my pain meds because I won;t have a laparascopy done so now I am detoxing, I had to drop two classes, I'm weeks behind in the 3 I kept, I lost 5 pounds cos the fucking state hospital's idea of gluten-free meals are a scoop of government peanut butter and three cups of canned fruit cocktail...

hospitals trigger my ptsd like fucking hell and if it weren't for all the meds I"m on right now I think I'd be fucked out of my mind.

right now the only thing that is helping is eating bacon cherry chocolate chip pancakes 4 meals in a row.

and this beautiful amazing inspiring song, which I've got on repeat.