Car Accident (Not Mine, But Still Mine)

Well, I'm back from my walk a little bit earlier than expected. As I went to turn the corner by my house, I noticed headlights coming at me, which is rather typical for these late-night excursions of mine. But something was different. I stopped. They weren't moving. The car was upside-down. I ran up the street, and as I was running I saw a shirtless man running out of his house across the street, and a young girl (probably my age or slightly younger), sitting on the curb crying. He made the call, and I asked the standard questions. There was not a scratch on her, yet this car had landed on its roof, driver-side first. After the initial questions, I of course responded, "Thank God you are alright." And she said, "No. Fuck me. Thank God I didn't hurt anyone else." And at that point, I realized that if I had left my house twenty or thirty seconds earlier, that car would have hit me. All of this plus the fact that I decided to walk out there tonight for no reason, in the cold, at this exact moment is making my head spin and my heart pound. I came back to my house after speaking briefly with one of the responding officers to tell my mother what had happened. And she said to me, "Maybe it wasn't for no reason then."

As much as I have been lost in my own depression lately, I am so lucky to be here at this very moment, as is this young woman. I am so proud to know that I am the kind of person who will run up the street, ready to pull someone out of a car if the situation called for it (I'm a certified EMT, so I do know when it does and does not, so please don't harass me about that!) I may not always have my shit together, but now I know for sure, when the situation is life-or-death, what kind of person I will be. And I think this is the closest to knowing your true self that you can possibly get.

Something Cute From Paper-Gender Math

I am thinking of a gender between one and three
An algebraic mosaic of x and y like sex
and why
do I write stories of my life between the valleys of my veins
Carve the dreams across my body
Starve the soul only a mirror can love
A numerator standing stop a vinculum of uncertainty with nothing underneath,
undefined and falling
searching for the common denominator that binds me to the x's I can never see
To the y's I can never know
Negative me plus or minus the square root of every lie I've ever told and ever smile I've ever faked
and every excuse I haven't even thought to make
I'm thinking of a gender between one and me
That isn't just a symbol of values long forgotten
A gender with ups and downs
Curves and swerves like the sine wave
that was my very first road
into the blankness of queer.
Every calculation became a question with two answers
Equally valid and to an equation
I can't even remember
Like the calculus I learned to forget
when they asked me to integrate. I laughed
and lived
and left the note in a bible in a motel six
in a town that couldn't even count that high
The hated (per)mutated masterpiece
that is the variable I.
Imaginary and unwilling to accept my fate,
I have taken to the Cartesian sea,
hoping to one day drift right back to the origin
where x and y meant nothing and it was all the same to me my mom and the boys next door.
Up the slope I go,
the letter m.
Acceleration made flesh.
A force to be reckoned with given enough distance
and time.

Worth

Even when I make the attempt to make plans, I can't complete them. And I'm not the kind of friend someone would be willing to drive an hour and a half to pick up. Hell, I'm not the kind of friend that anybody even wants to ask to do something when they live a mile away. I can't blame people for not wanting to be around me when I am like this, but to be honest, most people would never know if they were to interact with me in person. I don't share this part of myself with most people anymore. No one cares about anyone else's troubles, not really. When things are going great, everyone wants to be around me. But when I really need people, I am alone. And the only people who care enough are nowhere near me. I hate the way I sound. I hate what I have to look forward to when I wake up, and it all hits me that very second I open my eyes. And it never leaves. I can't shower without being miserable. I can barely eat. I can't walk ten feet from the door without feeling it. It's always there, and no amount of transient happiness can make it go away. It often physically hurts to be awake. But for me, emotions and physical sensations are hard to tease apart anyway.

I can't just drive to get away. Fuck, I can't even drive to go hang out with people who are going to be close to me tonight. And I would hate to ask my family because it's just too much. So once again, I'm at a point in my life and location in space where I can do absolutely nothing for myself. I've become just another burden to my family. And to myself. I don't like anything about me right now. This isn't who I am. When I was in Annapolis, I found myself again and really started loving who I was and what I could be. I didn't necessarily even need to be doing things radically different from what I am doing now. (But there are drastic differences...) But it's the feeling I had while doing them. The feeling I had just being there and being a part of something, and being able to feel that while being all by myself. Now, I can again be surrounded by people and feel all alone. It doesn't even matter. Sometimes I can't even feel connected to my own family and can barely feel connected to myself. There isn't much that I have that can numb me. Except sleep.

It is agony to be awake. Breathing hurts. Existing like this and not being able to do a fucking thing about it. I can't do this. I really can't handle this. I feel that if I am here for much longer, I will lose myself entirely. I was here for a year the last time, but I don't think I will be able to do that again. I don't know how many times I have to say over and over again that I can't do this. But that doesn't matter. I can't be helped by anyone or anything. I can't even function enough to do what I need to do to get out of this  mess, and there are no jobs around here for anyone like me. There are barely any to begin with, but retail literally made me want to kill myself, and I ended up cutting myself for the first time in my life because I could not process or handle anything that was going on in my life.

I almost feel that I am at the opposite end of the spectrum from that period of time. I had no room for anything but the job, and I lost myself because of it. Now, I have no room for anything but my current self, which is comprised mainly of walking misery. I need an escape from myself because I can't fucking stand this person who does not feel like me. I have spent so much of the last year and some months as this person who is not me. Annapolis gave me a chance to be myself again and rediscover what I love in this world. And having had that, and then having had it taken away, makes this so much worse than it was before. I don't want to be doomed to this forever, but I feel like my inability to function/focus is going to prevent me from getting anywhere.

Nobody here cares enough to ask me to do anything, or even respond when I ask them to do things, proving my lack of connection. And as this person, I don't feel like I will be able to connect. There is something about the totality of this experience that makes me incapable of being myself. I feel like I am watching myself die, and all I want to do is pull the plug.

Before I left, I had hope that things could be different. Now I have none because there is no way for me to make them any different. If I had the money, I'd leave today and start making changes. Or maybe I'd stay and get some more to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. I am more stuck than I have ever been. I want to ask for help from the people that I assume care about me, but I am afraid of running in to the same problem I had three weeks ago. How the fuck does that amount of time feel like an eternity? How is possible to fall so far from where you were and where you want to be in 21 days?

I want this part of the story to be over. But I worry so much that it will be the whole story. I expect life to be challenging, even hard sometimes. But if it is this hard, every minute of every day, I don't want any part of it. The only thing that is keeping me alive right now is my mother's love. She is the only person, at this moment, to whom I feel connected. She makes me feel human. And I would hate for her to think it was her fault if I were to do something to myself. I don't want her to blame herself for anything else that her children have done.

I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. I like who I am. But the problem is that I am not myself right now. And whoever it is that I am right now--that's the person I don't like. And I don't like my life situation. I feel that has brought about this change in me. I know that I absolutely need to be able to function on my own in order to feel like myself. But I am approaching the point where I will stop caring completely, and I will just sit here and waste away, both physically and mentally. How many fucking times do I have to do this to myself, and why do I feel so powerless?

Over and over again, this seems to be the only story I can tell. I just want to be able to breathe again and to see things for what they really are. And I don't want to believe that THIS is the way they really are. I want to experience GOOD again.

But I'll keep saying I'm okay. I'll keep lying and putting on that smile and telling other people that they shouldn't give up. I'm hoping for a fucking miracle that just isn't going to happen. I can't do this. And the fact that I have to keep saying that all the time means that I have never been able to. I started out doing just fine here, and I don't know why. And so I don't know how to get back to that. But I have to get back to that in order to move forward.

This isn't even worth posting to me. But I suppose I will do it anyway. There isn't anything of value in what I have written, similar to how there is nothing of value in what I have been doing. This life is worthless--this one I am forced to live. And I want the one that means something to me.

Obvious Update

In an effort to normalize my sleep schedule, I realized that I definitely overdid it waking up 16 hours later in essentially the same predicament since it was 6:00 PM. I managed to get a few more hours in the middle of the night, so I almost feel like a normal human being...but then I remember everything else that's going on, and sleep seems to be the only escape I have from this constant tightness in my core, a pressure in my stomach and chest that is both maddening and unrelenting. I cannot believe things have spiraled downward so quickly. In just two weeks, I feel like I have fallen further than I ever have before. At least before I left, I had hope. I have some goals for the future, but it is hard to focus on them right now. As afraid as I am of the passage of time, I sometimes wish I could wake up one year from now so that I could move away and start school. I only see my family, and while I love them, I cannot live like this. I feel so isolated. And I fear that will never change, permanently. I thought Annapolis was going to give me the start I needed. I thought it was my chance to move forward. But I was back here before I could figure out what was even happening.

I want to cry and scream, every single minute that I am awake.
I haven't seen the sun in 40 hours or so.
I do not think I can do this for much longer, even if I do manage to find some menial job to pass the hours away.

Nibble

It's funny how much I change when I am unable to be a part of something bigger than myself.

More About Home

Sometimes you want to ignore the little things in life that remind you of what you need to do, because what you want to do is putting so much pressure on you. There was the wedding and then TransPride and my wanting to be wrapped in the arms of the city that gave me life, but it was the smallest of things that brought me to tears. He noticed the city lights shining brightly through a gap in the trees and gasped, "It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." And on my lips the words sat in silence, "I know." After getting lost and ending up in the exact opposite place we needed to be, I took him to the overlook on Mount Washington. He took a picture. I didn't need to. I could never forget that sight, or how it seemed so much bigger and scarier when I had first visited eight years ago. I took in the scene as slowly as I could and let it wash over my body like a warm bath, little memories rising up and popping like bubbles in the tub. And then I could hold back no longer. I cried as softly as I could and muttered so only my own ears could share the secret: "I am home."

Flash two weeks into the future. I am sitting in the still unoccupied massage room of the newly opened gym at which I had begun working, crouched over my dying cell phone as I attempt to charge and talk at the same time. She didn't answer. She didn't answer again. She was talking to her other son, which I had not known until she called me back a few seconds after receiving a simple text: "It's important." I unleashed tears. And fears. And everything that I had been fighting the last few days. It was settled in just a few minutes. And I had made the decision myself. She would not tell me what to do. She did not tell me what I should do. She waited for me to utter the words myself: "I want to come home." So I packed up my things and made my coworkers aware of the situation, and as I stooped and slung my bag over my shoulder to begin the longest ten-minute walk of my life, a key fell to the floor. The sticker from Lowe's hadn't even been removed. I hadn't seen this key in almost a year. It was the key to the front door of the very first place I called home.