Remember this, if nothing else.

Happy Christmas to everyone.

Here's to peace, good will, and abundant friendship.

Cognac at 2

makes me realize that

I'm doomed to be alone,

I'll never be completely okay with that fact,

I will be frustrated that I'm not okay with it,

So I will try to find out why I can't be okay with it.

I will search my entire life for an answer

and I will probably die trying to find one.

And I'm okay with that.

Really, I am. And you know why?

Because I'll probably find so many more things along the way.

So many more things that you will never find.

Suburban cheer

Where I live,

they hold landscaping contests and give out awards like "Best Decorated" or "Best Lawn" for those giddy, golddigging housewives to display in front of their whitewashed houses on signs stuck in front of their houses.

Where I live,

girls get cars for their 16th birthdays, boys inherit the businesses of their fathers, relatives fly in from far away states for holiday, and they all dress up to go to church every Sunday morning.

Where I live,

happy mittened children help their fathers hang lights from their roofs in icicle formations 25 days before Christmas while their adolescent siblings get drunk off of eggnog at house parties when they come back from school.

Where I live,

children write letters to Santa and sleep soundly in snowflake pajamas on Christmas Eve, knowing that everything they wrote in those letters will be wrapped in colorful packages by the morning.

Where I live,

we put the tree in front of the downstairs window to display for the others,

so perhaps, they will all believe that behind the locked doors of 118, there are also fires in the fireplace, those happy mittened children, a mother baking cookies, and presents underneath the fake, plastic tree.

Silent nights, empty nights.

solving puzzles

It has been tugging at my brain, and I've figured it out.

My indifference funk this time isn't as much random as it is subconsciously premeditated.

It's a defense mechanism.

Because I can't afford to feel certain things, this time. I can't afford to have expectations, because I can't afford to lose expectations. I am in some small degree of trauma recovery, and my brain understood that before I did.

And because we can't choose to be selectively indifferent, here I am. How I am.

So perhaps, this time, instead of trying to fight indifference as I usually do,

I should just embrace it.

Oh, Apathy, you smell like love.

Rush.

I was strange, restless, but not restless in a good way. Restless in a lost way. Like I had to find somewhere I felt comfortable, because I couldn't seem to feel comfortable where I was.

It happens fairly frequently to me, every once in a while. There are some days when I'm just in a funk. I guess this was one of those days.

It was a sort of indifferent funk. I've been in it for about a week. I couldn't walk it off, nor could I sleep it off. Watching Holocaust movies didn't even work.

So I took the elevator to the top floor of the second-highest building around. And then I took the stairs to the roof. And then I climbed a 50-foot vertical ladder to an even taller portion of the roof with a book of 18th-century prose in my hand.

And then I felt.

As I climbed that tall ladder with a huge book in one hand and my other gripping tightly to the frozen cold metal rail of the ladder, I felt.

It was fear, but it wasn't indifference. Anything is better than indifference.

Maybe it was the knowledge that the only thing that kept me from dropping to a miserable, inevitable death was my one, shaking hand grasping onto one side of the ladder above my head and my two, shaking feet standing on the rung below.

But it was a rush, a rush of exhilaration stemming from the knowledge that my sole, short existence rested in the grip of one hand, literally. Knowing that I could drop abysmally though the gray, chilly air at any moment, and knowing that it was very possible.

Knowing that with each rung I climbed, I was a couple steps closer to death, closer to teetering on the edge, closer to not ever being able to finish the story I was reading.

And it felt good.

Not much of a revelation.

I know why relationship stability eludes me.

Because it's simply not consistent with the restless, the sleepless, the fickle, the overcontemplative, the searching, the wandering, the scared, the adventurous, the bored, the mad, the desirous,

which are the only characteristics in others that can hold my attention for long enough.

.......Or perhaps it's just because those are all characteristics of myself.

Blindfolded

You've got your hands over my eyes,

and I'm not sure what I should be seeing. Or, for that matter, whether I should be seeing anything

at all.

Or whether my heart should beat quite as quickly as it does,

or whether my mind should spend any time fearing the thought of letting a stranger in my head.

There are some things I no longer know how to do,

and I tire of gray.

So please, be either black or white for me tonight

so, if nothing else, I can learn to sleep again.