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›comments[0] ›all comments ›post #746 ›bio: kristen ›perma-link ›10/16/2025 ›11:57 ›archives ›first post ›that week
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No matter what the text said - even if it was a fucking 'thumbs up', she was grateful to have encountered him. It was such a relief to wake up and not feel like she wanted to die and there was no purpose to her monotonous lonely ass life. She had spoken to him last night feeling as always like a boring dipshit. She wished she could be like Mary or Lin and just be cool elusive girls he wanted to fuck and went out with and talking about anything. With Narcissi, it was always limited. She imposed a wall that was like for a skittish baby deer. She could never talk about how much she liked him or how he felt about her - or just feel relaxed. She was constantly on high alert that she would push him away if she didn't keep it light and about work or society. On the other hand, it was such a drain to constantly think "this is the last contact I'll ever have with him. This is it. He doesn't like me and he's done finally with me. He won't contact me anymore." It got real old, and she tried like survival to look at it another way - that he was helping her to go there - to really put herself in the land of valid existence. Not only did all the portents tease her with meaning, she couldn't forget how weird it was from the very day she met him. That second night - when he lost his phone she later found out - but to her it felt like ghosting - she went to a dark night of the soul like she had never before experience. It was intense people - real intense. She was holding on by a pinky nail. None of it made logical sense to her. She had found him, so why was she sitting on the sofa at 3am listening to an obscure Vic Chestnut album lamenting her dashed hope that she would never see him again - and that was to be the tragedy of her modern life. It was hard for her to shake that singular occasion of knowing and losing - and she often came back to it and touched it like a wounded herd animal in the dark. She was forced to change the song in her current state. She felt a decade older - hopefully wiser. Her higher self, sat her down on the stool and gave her a drink and made her know it wasn't possible for her to be any other way than the way she had been with him. She knew that there were aspects of her that she had never shown. It took her time to really trust someone. It was OK. She came by it honestly. The relieving part to her was that if she lost him now, that she didn't feel compelled to tell him that she was mad - and that her family was a dark treasure trove of tragedy that a too-intelligent too-sensitive child took on for far too long. She tried to repeatedly tell herself that she didn't care if he never wanted to be with her again - that she still had worth. This was a challenge to instill. Maybe no one in this small ass town was her friend, but it wasn't because she wasn't worth being friends with. She could pull on her past and recognize she had been very much wanted - just not by her parents har har. Yesterday, she had done what she often did in those dark times repeating over and over "I just want to die. I just want to die. I don't want to be here anymore." And although she initiated it, the dopamine of his text gave her life like a vampire. She knew that theme well. She had had a dream about a lady starving vampire chasing her through a sterile city scape. She had surprisingly thrwarted the vampire by kicking it down, shutting a door, and making other people deal with it. She wasn't going to be the victim. Once she was awake, it broke her heart that he was so thrilled at the Athens events to come - the start of the season she called it - but none of it included her. At last he didn't have to use her to not be bored. He had new cyclical distractions. Maybe he would find new people to fuck. Maybe she wasn't that rare. It hardly bothered her as she didn't want to be seen as some dick-wettening apparatus anyway. Because she was so fucking afraid to hope, the ending had already been written by her several times. Yesterday in her lost, self-pitying state, she put away almost all of the reminders - the tokens that she used to think he might actually one day love her. (but, she left the acorns right by her work computer - and she wore the Florida shirt for the third day in a row.) It was something like trying to choose her instead of death of her worth. She took her meds like a lifeline - anything that might help in driving away that black hole of shame and wanting to disappear. But always going back to that weirdest of nights after he had touched her soul - the one where she almost lost her mind at the thought of losing him after tasting him so surely. The reason was because her instinct had told her that he was for her. She trusted that like people trusted God. She might be the most mundane cliche of a person. He might put her down like he knows everything about her already, but the important thing always is to remember. Everyone - every kitten - every puppy - every baby deer/fawn - mattered just as much as she did. So, she wasn't some superstar in the world of whatever, she breathed - she counted. She couldn't figure out why typing such a simple sentence brought tears to her eyes. She often wondered if she could ever really understand the worth of her. So she went back to the only thing she understood, and she had understood it since that dark shank of morning - sobbing and rocking on the sofa and trying to hang on to some semblance of pandora's hope - was that the way she was wired, it was always going to be a struggle to deserve to live - always she was going to question - like Camus - whether her existence amounted to a hill of beans. She had to keep standing up even if no one ever appeared out of the dark to grasp her hand to help her. Yesterday, she even laughed at the repetitive desire to escape from it all - to die. "For fuck's sake narcissi, you have an entire tattoo to remind you that you chose to live when your depressed ass could have just called it a wrap and stopped living. You stood up then and asked for help. You wanted to live. You marked your best portion of skin with it. Remember that - you were supposed to use this to never forget." And she listened again to the horoscope from the expensive astrologer with a three year waiting list. She remembered this was succinctly not the first time - she recalled the most recent one - another dark night of her soul when she was sitting in a new place on a bean bag in Oakland where the drunk walkers of the street screamed in pain throughout the night - after a man she had never loved beat her and she railed up and screamed "Coward!" at both him and her father. She knew this was not the most pained she'd ever felt. It was just hard to feel it when she grasped so hard. "This man is not a god. He never asks you anything about yourself. He makes love properly only when he's wasted. He doesn't even like your writing - he made fun of it. He's never once given you a fucking compliment, but he's definitely given you criticism. He's a walled off man. He's just a human - just like you - trying to not feel alone. stop making him into the arbiter of your worthiness to live." She had said this in front of the circular mirror her sister had bought for her in setting up this exiled home. She had so many other tokens not put away that reminded her she was loved - even if from a millennial distance. Now, she also added thoughts to her mind. She had been alone a long time. She was very very used to being alone. She remembered that there were worse things than being alone. She was grateful that she existed even if no one on planet earth ever even got a glimpse of who she was - if no one ever read her. "Sometimes I have to remind myself that there's a place I can describe for over two decades on a happy robot where I can always go to where people really love/d me. I can go back to Wilmington. I can go see the first man who broke me apart by not wanting to be with me. I can smoke pot with him, and we can trade stories and wounds. I can call on the girl who sat next to me at a July 4th party and told me she'd been fascinated with me since she saw me who still feeds my soul and begs me to remember who I am. I can laugh with the best dancer I've ever played with and we can walk his current dog down the river. I can call on Jungle and be called Martin and feel peace just by sitting. I can know that my first husband permeates all of this, and that although I'm too painful or something to be around, we still text, and he will always love me. I can walk in the ghosts of being the coolest girl in a town that is now an airbnb fantasy and know that I'm here. I'm loved." The Norfolk pine was now outside her window. She was tired of looking at it dying and wanted it to have a good view for its last hurrah - or at least be away from her. Besides, Christmas season was coming up, and she could always buy another one at the local Kroger. He might text her again one day. He might not. She was going to go on a walk around the victory lap today. She lived.
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