blameless; distracted

i need to stop waiting for the last minute.

i need to stop smoking in my apartment. i need to stop smoking. i need to stop eating things that make me sick. jalapeno chips and salsa, and anything that involves grease.

i have stomach aches all the time. any time, if i am awake, if i am breathing, i have a stomach ache. i need to stop having stomach aches.

i need to stop waiting around, wishing for things that i know are never going to happen. not in this life.

i think i need to resign myself to living this life alone. i think that will help make the stomach aches go. my mom thinks im diabetic and my brothers think that i just need to stop eating spicy foods.

i think that i need to stop carrying around the weight of everything ive ever lost. it centers itself there, in the solar plexus. before it, my softest skin. behind it, parts of me that get ignored so frequently that any touch is alien, will make me jump.

"A blow to that area, if it penetrates to the true solar plexus, not only causes great pain but may also temporarily halt visceral functioning."

this is all because i am struggling now with the loss of something i held inside me for many years, something that kept me going. a very tactile sense of hope, rough like the woolen plaid blankets we used to keep in the living room. the ones the cats scratched to bits.

i want you to know who i am. i want you to know that i like my iced tea sweetened and that my collection of notebooks is just a symptom of an unseemly obsession with adverbs. i want you to know that i like being kissed on the sternum and that i secretly worship bon jovi and that i give up when things get hard. i want you to know that i panic when anything tiny goes wrong, my face contorts and i forget to breathe and sometimes i cry.

i want you to know that i want to make everyone happy, but i havent got the strength. or the time, or the energy. i never get enough sleep.

but more than that. i want you to want to know. i want you to be delighted when i go nearly crazy over the absence of limes in the house, that i will go to the grocery store at any hour of the day or night to buy limes because truly i can not live without them.

i have devised and perfected a million techniques to offer up to you little tiny bits of my life, and i know that you have collected them, because you remembered them when we spoke. and your former beauty lay among snowdrifts somewhere in the past i like to forget about but you knew who i was.

not because you wanted to, but because i plied you with hints and subtleties.

i need to go out more. i need to forget about the joy of your arm across my waist at three in the morning.

i need to find fulfillment in things more tangible, that last longer. like the sunlight on the river outside my window. i think i will try.

i need to understand that beauty is not the end, and that if i were beautiful, things would not be better. i would still be panicky, and i think there would still be days that i might pause in front of the mirror and cry over the hatred i have for what i see there.

i need to find someone who will not shave off his beard. i need to think that i will not fail.