I look so different form the outside--

Just a blind observation as she viewed herself in a Polaroid.

She was alone and distant, looking out the window and into the sky. She was silent and beautiful, watching the stars. Her thoughts were swallowed, internal secrets; her memories were forgotten. If anything else in the world existed, she was unaware--unaware of the rising sun, unaware of the camera, unaware of the boy taking the picture, watching her with intense and careful devotion.

I look so different from the outside. I suppose we all do. Yeah. I suppose we all do.

What is a female? A walking, eating disorder. No matter how well adjusted, how bright, how good intentioned, a female is little more than an eating disorder on two legs.

Stress and overeating. Broken diets. Skipping meals. Midnight snacks. Comfort foods. Too-tight jeans. Baggy sweatshirts. Low-rise, high-rise, skin baring. Sex on TV. Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Peer pressure and weight loss pills. Blind parents. Super-sized America.

Females are self-made victims, vomiting into school toilets and wearing shirts one size too small. They are eating disorders waiting for an excuse to feed themselves fat. They are aware and hypocritical and lost little girls.

Driving in the summer. Clear sky. Cars parked at the auto wreakers like prisoners on death row. The recycling center is full of trash. The world is distant and cool, disappearing in the side view mirror. The sun is swallowed by the clouds as the car turns behind the trees and the skin prickles. The silence fits like an oversized sweatshirt.

This is what love is like as the sun passes overhead--a breathing, unspoken whispers, closed-mouth affection. This is thoughtful thoughtlessness. This is her absent smile and his distracted attention.

This is driving on long roads. This is summer.

What do you do? Do you carve yourself up like some Thanksgiving turkey? Is that it?

Yeah, basically. Yeah, something like that.

I've been wanting to tell the truth for a while. I've been waiting for these questions. Because, you see, behind the long sleeves and the secrets part of this really is a plea for help. Part of it really is a wish to be noticed. This is weakness--the fear that I'm not worth it, that I'm not strong enough, that I can't do this. The yearning for recognition and reaffirmation and love.

So, yeah, that's basically it.

If someone had told me:

This boy will come to know the rhythms of your body just as well as you do. This boy will be able to take you from sullen to sudden to silent and back again. This boy will tear you down and build you back up. This boy will whisper his tears into your ear. This boy will eat your secrets. This boy will shove his soul into yours. This boy will invade you. This boy will break your heart and you will love him for it.

If someone had warned me, I would have laughed.

In this house where it is difficult to tell the dog from the child, the world has already fallen apart.

Music screams from the speakers and the ground is shaking. By the bedrooms, the wall gaps a hole that rests comfortably at the ankle. Underfoot, the carpet is stained. Insects and bacteria are coming to give life to air that has grown musty.

In this house where the walls are crumbling, in this dusty room, these children just became adults. They are shivering without the tears. They are never letting go. In this house, the world has already fallen apart.

She has just realized that the smell is his. The smell that she has noticed while turning the corner, while climbing the stairs; the smell that has sat just beneath her nostrils; the smell that has coated the air: that musty dusty skin smell is his.

It is everywhere. Every time she forgets to breathe through her mouth it is there. Her body is covered in it because he has been there, his touch has been there, his breath has been there, his skin has been there.

That smell belongs to him, but she's the one that reeks of it.

Damn you,

(because the atheist should feel free to take God's name in vain)

damn you all for your unintended greed, for your accidental guilt, for your involuntary demands. Damn you.

You want me to smile. You want to anticipate the apocalypse. You want me to talk about my luck and my joy and my consecrated future. I'm expected to accept this, move on, realize that this is it, this is all, shit happens, life falls apart and then life goes one, and it's for the best anyway.

I know. I'm aware. I get it.

Still hurts--

So fuck you.

Do you think about cutting deeper?

Yes, every single day.

Even when the urge to cut isn't there, even when, for a while, the reasons are gone, you think about it every single day because that's what it is, that's what it does, that's how it goes. It's an addiction.

Every singe day means that it will come to you when you are walking across campus and nothing else is on your mind. When you are showering the old wounds will sting and you will think about it. While crossing your legs, while reading, while talking--it is always there.

I'm too tired to think of anything to say--anything worth saying. I'm exhausted, so I'll just ramble.

The internet has gone down again. No one is stopping by my dorm. In fact, I've yet to have a single visitor and I'm beginning to worry that I'll be isolated, here, and lonely. My parents and sister leave tomorrow and I need to get up somewhat early (or, at least, not too late) to say goodbye to them, but I don't think that I want to sleep tonight. I have nothing to do, no inspiration to write, nothing to say.

Sorry.

It's like my pastime is fucking up, you know. It's like that's what I do.

I guess you just gotta be good at something.

It's never anyone's fault. There never is a fault. It's the situation, the circumstance, and no one ever did anything wrong. There's nothing to worry about. There's nothing to feel guilty about.

Except that its still a fuckup and it still hurts. It is still wrong. No choice, no intent, no harm meant, but it still hurts.

So you dress in black. You swear. You cut and you cry. You give up. And it still hurts.

Life, theoretically, is about compromise--you do what you hate because you have to and in return you remain alive, remain acceptable, remain operable. Theoretically.

Theoretically, when I am speaking these words to him I am doing my part in giving; theoretically, I will in turn gain some vague sort of social significance. Theoretically.

Today it occurred to me that maybe I simply do not mind him, that I am still very much in love with someone else, and that the game of social significance is already lost.

The theories are dead for me, in my remorse and broken hope.

I still love you.

If I could say one thing in honesty, if I could release my swollen tongue from my teeth, if I could speak in earnest one last time then I could add one word to those old never-tired three we know so well and I would remind both you and I of what we already know, what we remember before bed and with waking, what we hold on to so desperately:

I still love you.

But you knew that, and that was why you asked. Because you already knew my answer.

I gave it to you anyway.

I never was one for this exaggerated sense of community and it shows. I am alone now, while all the rest of this goes on around me just as it would were I not here.

Do forgive me the self-pity.

I was never good at acting as though I cared about social stipulations, the ways that we are supposed to act. I suppose that's why I'm can't do this. I always found it too ironic that we are at our least human when we are socializing to even try.

So now I am sitting here, writing, and I am alone.

At this point I don't miss anything at all.

Maybe there hasn't been enough time to learn to do so. Likely, there are no reasons why I should. Regardless, I see nothing to miss right now. Not my home or my bed. Not my family. Not my friends. Not even the boy that I love and should cry for.

There are a thousand memories, so many nameless little things, countless treasured details--and I know that--but all of those are in the past.

What is there to miss? Those things are all dead now, dead, gone, and behind me.

There will be a boy, sometime soon, with thick dark hair, full lips, and just enough weight to make his body firm and solid.

There will be a long-limbed girl with slim hips, a bare stripe of skin below her navel, and short hair. There will be a girl, soon.

I will soak him in lust. I will leave my needs with her. I will be rid of this: I will no longer crave giving, crave having, crave touch as I do now. I will not want so desperately.

He need not remember me. She need never know my name.

I didn't hurt as much as I had expected it to.

No, that's not quite right--

I'm not feeling the pain.

--or--

I'm ignoring the pain.

The words are difficult to get right.

I am avoiding all thought of pain and all thought of consequences because I am afraid that when I do stop to think, there will be nothing there. I am afraid that I will not cry. I am afraid I will not even care.

I know that I love him. I loved him then and I still love him now.

But why is there nothing else?

What was the last thing you did purely because it hurt?

I talked on the phone with my ex-boyfriend because I knew that I would end up crying. It's like ripping your heart from you chest for the hell of it.

I scraped my skin with scissors blades, afraid to cut but taking comfort in the fact that it almost hurts worse just to scrape.

I sat down to write about all of those things that I simply shouldn't think about.

And you, my seldom strangers and infrequent readers: what was the last thing you did just because it hurt?

I am lying--

every month she says it, every month she bleeds, every month she writes hundreds of words about nothing

--I am lying, I am stretching the truth, I am making up stories.

Just fucking with you, buddy.

Just playing with your head, making you wonder--

Where is the line? What happened to the line? (Was there ever a line?)

(Is there such a thing?)

--funny, that the answers are up to you. The truth depends on how much you believe and what you want to believe. It's up to you.

I'm just fucking with you, buddy.

Then there are the ones that are so beautiful, so fine, so thin that I can't be sure if I hate them or need them, it I want them or just want to be them. Some of them really are that perfect.

I wish I were like her: slim, with no inch wasted; blond and sweet and empty; nervous, almost, in her small-breasted attractiveness; dressed in white and pink and skin.

I wish she would notice me. I wish she would recognize that I am here, sharing her precious space, her clean air, her human warmth.

This is simple wanting.

Today I sat by the stream with a headache, sore shoulders, and an empty stomach. I watched the crows pick at the water. I talked sat in silence.

Today I woke up tired.

Today I wrote about emptiness in vacant words that mean nothing. Today, I reflected on my lack of life.

When this day has passed I promise to finally fulfill my potential—more than that: I will attempt happiness. I will come out of this silent slump. I will speak again and move again and live again in a day that, no doubt, will be exactly like today.

So why do we do this, anyway? Why do we pack ourselves up and ship ourselves off in order to get some or another education, join twenty-eight teams and clubs, sleep in too-small rooms, and eat bad food? What's the point?

Excuse my current lack of enthusiasm, current lack of wonder, even my current lack of understanding. I'm still waiting for the lightening bolt of realization. I want to know why I'm here because, right now, it seems like an awful lot of work for just this hotel, half-assed, still-waiting feeling.

I'm still waiting, yeah, still waiting for the flash.

The world is not falling apart.

Today the sky is not breaking, the world is not ending, nothing is falling to pieces. Rather, life is passing, days are moving, and you are living—living like any young man, living like any broken-hearted fool, living only as you have set yourself up to live.

I loved you and I'm sorry, I love you and I'm sorry; but I can't pity you any more. I wish that things were better, I wish I could make it better; but that rests on your shoulders now. Your life is no longer mine to live.

I was asked why I write these 100 words.

Why scribble empty sentences between classes? Why count out tens? Why labor over one words too many or three too few? Why rush at the end of each month to complete the set? What's the point?

I am honest here. It may be hard to tell. Yes, I love to lie. But through it all I am honest here:

Honest in my apathy, honest in my opinion, honest in my love, honest in my hate, honest in my confusion, my wonder, my fear, my will, my want:

Honest in my honesty.

I've been waiting quite a while to be this busy.

My enemy has always been inactivity—because that's when forward thought ceases and circular though begins, that's when I get caught up in wondering and in nothing at all.

Busy work never solved it—that occupies so little of the mind and the rest is still free to chase its tail.

This: this is true activity, frantic involvement and reason. There is a point to this. I am here to be and to learn. And, yes, I love it. I absolutely love it. I love knowing why.

(flash bang, right?)

I hate the end of the month.

That's when the ideas are gone. That's when I start panicking for time. That's when I'm forced to write these things just one after another.

Pisses me off, to be honest.

It reminds me that I'm never gonna to make it as a writer, that I'm really not that good, that my originality is more of a lack thereof, and that I can't get things done on time for my life.

This is month eleven, for those who care.

You think I'd've gotten better by this point. You'd be wrong, but who cares?

Worry is no longer the right word.

I'm concerned. I'm frightened. Moreover, I'm powerless.

Maybe you're doing nothing wrong. Maybe there's nothing you could do. Maybe the situation is out of your control.

I'm merely concerned that this is too much for you. I'm frightened that you may fall victim to the circumstances. Moreover, I'm powerless to do anything, no matter how much I want to help you: there's nothing I can say to make it better, nothing I can tell you to do that would fix things.

I'm far away and watching, and that's all that I can do.

I get this email telling me my partner won't be my partner for the Lewis and Clark tournament—she'll be pairing with someone whose partner can't make it. Oh, that's ok, I'm free to pick a partner from the 121 class for that tournament.

The 121 one class. The easy class. The doesn't-actually-need-to-go-to-a-tournament-all-year-to-get-an-A class.

Bullshit.

You know what this means? It means that my coach doesn't think I'm good enough for my partner. It means that he thinks that, at every opportunity, she should be moved up and removed from the disadvantage of me.

Bullshit.

Why do I bother, anyway?

Empty (adj):

You're off partying and staying up all night; I'm running myself ragged with work and loving it. You're drinking sprite and I'm skipping meals. You are flirting but I am watching, always watching, wondering, saying nothing.

Empty and too full are nearly the same thing.

But we exhaust ourselves with memories. My grip is growing weak and it is getting harder and harder to hang on to something that no longer is. You may think you're moving but you're really standing still, in that place just a few moments after we dropped hands in front of your house.

You have your lasts and I'll have mine—

My last trace of your collarbone. My last run of your shirt hem. My last kiss on your shoulder. My last palmprint on your chest. My last clutch of your hair. My last shaking touch.

No one ever touched you but me, remember?

My last words are already spoken and there's nothing I can say. I can't step you through this process of letting go. You may not even know that these are my lasts—

My last kiss, my last grasp, my last memory—

You may not even notice, but they are.

The timeline is out of order.

The events are warped and skewed.

The irony is far too heavy.

The humor is a little sick.

Honestly, the writing isn't that good.

The memories are overly dramatic.

The writing was clearly done too quickly.

There was, in the end, no reason to bother.

This is me, these words are me, the exaggeration is still me, the needing is me, the honesty is me, and goddamn it if I can't write worth a damn I'm still going to fucking try, I'm still going to put this crap out there. It's what I do.