ericboy's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- \"...If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next\" - Manic Street Preachers I'm freezing. I'm melting. I'm always something. Currently I'm shaking. I don't know if it's the coffee or the cold clinging to my skin, refusing to be ignored. I want to ignore it, to ignore everything, to fall asleep and stay that way until I can't physically do it anymore. I want to sleep until I'm exhausted of sleep. I want to sleepsleepsleepsleepsleepsleep. The shaking is annoying, bothersome, cumbersome, fucking nerve-racking. I hate it. I was sitting outside, minding my own damn business. I just wanted to work on my book and smoke a few cigarettes and drink a (single) cup of coffee. I opened the book, skipped a few pages to allocate for the incomplete introduction, and started to write. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad; it was my words coming from me and freezing in time, for me to reference whenever I fancied. I unfolded a piece of paper that I'd printed out from my e-mail. It was my mother's notes on my nomadic youth. I stared at the words like foreign invaders, myself a xenophobic cretin holding myself tightly, to guard. I started crying. There was nothing disturbing in her notes; not on this page, at least. It was merely a list of the homes (and I use that term loosely) that we'd occupied and brief approximations of time. Nothing disturbing. Nothing about my brother's suicide, my father's binge drinking and drug using and subsequent beatings, my oblivious outlook on the world around me for the first eight years of my life, my inability to sustain relationships without growing bored or wanting to break someone just to see what they look like when broken. Just a list of the spaces that I used to be in. I was crying. People were watching. The coffee was laughing. I looked at those pages, names of cities, old acquaintences, dates, frames-of-reference in relation to age and space... and I didn't recognize any of it... at first. When it came to me, it didn't seep in as the cold through the glass. No. It hit, knocked the wind out of me, slapped me, fucked me, broke me, and threw me back down. WAS this my life? IS this my life? I was scared of it. I AM scared of it. I look at my past, I see it, smell it, feel it crawling over me again, more urgent this time around, and I don't want it. I don't want my past. I don't want my life. I don't want anything. All I am is violence, death, and violent death. I've been here before, I'll be here again, and right now, I hate everything, everyone, and especially myself. More than all of that, I hate my tears. They were cold and stuck to my face and made me shake harder. I'm shaking harder now than I was when I started this. I rose, went to the bathroom, dried myself, composed myself as best I could, went back to the book and tried to continue writing. I couldn't. I closed the book. I grabbed my journal and wrote. I couldn't stop. It put my "book" to shame. It was anguished; painful to write, painful to read, painful to admit. I kept my cool. A man started talking to me. I was too weak and broken to tell him to kill one of us so that I wouldn't have to listen to him, so I listened to him. I occasionally tried to speak, but he would bulldoze over my words with another obscure tangent. He regaled me, or tortured me (it depends), with stories of all the legendary people that he had met and the astonishing things that he had learned from them. Apparently, though, he's done with learning, as he didn't listen to a single fucking word that fell out of my stupid, vacuuous mouth. He did retain my name, though, so that he could regurgitate it regularly, a psychological tactic to keep my attention. He asked me to help him load some things from his bookstore across the street into his car. I agreed. Courteous to a fault. He read a poem from a first-edition Charles Bukowski book. The poem was "Mama", which I'd heard before. When he read it, he used that stupid fucking "I'm reading a work of great importance to you" breathy voice and employed a lot of useless pauses. I wanted to tear his throat out and spit in the gory pulp that was left of his neck. I fucking hate that shit. I shivered with the cold, watched my precious hours slip away that I had hoped to utilize for sleeping, and asked myself repeatedly "What the hell am I doing here?" When he was finished with me, he released me into the wild, like those who exploit me always do, and I escaped again with my life. Once more into the fray and ready again for another long day. I tried to pick up the work on my book again but found myself writing over and over again on each margin of each page: "Is this really my life?" Currently, I am good for nothing and no one. Sleep is all that I need right now. All that I can handle. As it is, I'm looking at less than two hours' worth, after having shy of four over the past three days. It's a wonder I'm still alive. The shaking has subsided a bit. 3:28 a.m. - 2003-12-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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