I suppose the only logical answer is that I was born with an arsenal of voodoo dolls at my disposal, which I freely hand to any and all who will take them. To avoid misinterpretation, allow me to be frank: they are my voodoo dolls. They are of my image, bare my features, wound my being. This must be the case, otherwise these sporadic throbbing pains would cease to make sense.

**

I'm drafted to a pendulum, in constant motion, unable to control my velocity or direction. I go where the earth takes me, victim of the current of the times and the tilt of the atmosphere, spellbound by the force that holds you steady.

**

I'm weak. All this does is show me I'm weak. And that I'm going to have to keep putting up with all these kinds of things because how else will I ever get stronger?

And I hate that I can't say more than that. Hopefully I'll be able to say more this week. I don't know. Sorry for wasting your time.

Monologue: Stay

I'm not tethered to this place, freed by the limitation of falling. There is breath that fills my lungs and alleviates my heart, there is a shaking of foundations that oysters up new birth.

I am free, I am calm, I am at ease.

I think I'll write a monologue:



I'm not playing this game anymore. I'm not chasing you like dogs allegedly chase cars. I'm not...wasting that much time on you. The hardest thing about this is that I'm not mad. A little annoyed, but not mad. I wish I was. I wish I could curse your name and fume to my friends. I wish I could despise you. Anger makes it easier to let go. It's easier to overturn tables and bite my thumb at you than it is to stay here.

But that's what I have to do. Stay. There's no one to blame when things simply fall apart. No one was wrong in us not being right. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt... This is the life I get to lead now, watching you roam with that harness on, safe and secure while I fall, watching you live and breath and experience all the things I'd hoped for us...all things I hope for with someone else if someone else would call. If anyone else would call. Because after you, no one's called.

The universe has a system of give and take, and often it all comes at once. One good opportunity is handed over and suddenly dozens more are at the door, but a week before all was nothing. The road led nowhere, all was vain and pointless.

You left and took it all with you. You unstopped the drain and everything the universe could have been handing me swirled into oblivion, vanishing from beneath my feet and between my toes. And I can't hate you for it. And that's the hardest part.

Heavy Hearted

She cut me like a knife. I staggered back and felt the air fill the gash where skin used to be suspended. I slowly clenched a fist against my heart and wished it didn't sting as much as it stung.

I've never been scathed by something she'd said before. I'd been miffed and confused, maybe exceptionally irritated, but never scathed.

It was as if, for the first time in my life, my mother had dumped boiling water on me and then pushed me down a flight stairs to let the blisters bloom. I knew she didn't mean it, with each step I crashed past I knew it was just a mood she was in, but that didn't stop her words from ripping everything I've ever held in consolation from my fingers, every picture of hope off the walls.

He did it well enough, in high school. He showed me that love was a fragment of my own mind, something of my own make that would never be reciprocated and never reciprocated in the way I expected. Love would always fall short, and time and time again experience proved him to be right. He showed me the dark side to men--the dark side of everyone; the side that plays more into our prideful pompous hearts than leans into the thought that perhaps I'm doing wrong by someone else right now. Perhaps I'm crossing a line.

But the Barbie doll house didn't go up in flames until my mother had to tell me I was wrong. And as much as I knew she didn't mean it, as much as I knew it was frustration at a thousand other things and that was the thing she chose to vocalize about, it couldn't help but hurt when Mom said marriage was pointless. It couldn't help but hurt when I was so elated by the idea that someday-someday-I'll have that thing I reached for as a five year old, that thing I acted out with dolls, that thing I idealized with Disney cartoons: that someday I'll have love.

And she spat in my face.

My parents aren't getting divorced, I don't want people to think that my life is crumbling to pieces. It was a bad day on her part. But it's made every day since that much more worse for me, because suddenly I have this nagging fear at the back of my mind that I had quieted. This doubt that keeps rising that it's still just a construct of my mind, it's still just part of my imagination, and that love won't find me and that I won't find it, and that even when I do it doesn't matter.

Because it's pointless.

I wanted to say, If that was true, then why do so many people do it? If that was true then why has unity between man and wife withstood the test of time, why has that lasted? Why am I here if a procreation of love was pointless? Why would God let something so beautiful be pointless?

I know He wouldn't. He couldn't. But this dense tar of doubt clings to each glorified expression, growing stringier and needier with each desperate yank I make to rid myself of it.

I have optimism. I'm not saying I don't think anyone will ever find me attractive, or that anyone will ever be a kindred heart to mine, I'm just...

When you wake up as a teenager and you're awkward and your hair is greasy and you're chubby. And you have braces. And clothes make you look like a bloated box and you sound like a man and the only thing pretty about you is your eyelashes, but you fiddle with your eyelashes and pull at them because you've been doing it since you were a child and they're getting thinner and thinner... you start to doubt that any of those really cute boys that you keep talking about with your friends will ever actually look at you and remember who you are. And when that part of you dies, when that awkward phase ends and that part of you dies and you start to look the way you'd always hoped you did but acknowledged deep down you were terribly far from, you have to rebuild yourself and say that you weren't making things up when you were a kid and everyone was equally as ugly. That you just took a minute longer than everyone else to stop being hideous.

And you build yourself again.

And the last thing when you want when you're constructing yourself anew and establishing footing in a skin you didn't think you'd ever appreciate, is to hear that the thing you've been rooting for your entire life, that all encompassing goal, the end all of end all of everything, isn't as great as it's cracked up to be.