Never never land.

November 13, 2005

I throw myself into things naively, blindly, and so I burn; until I am ashes, gray and thin like an old hag. I think of how I am left so disenchanted with this world I do not feel my own age. Any other time the phrase would lead me to say that I feel sixteen and trapped inside of that adolescent phase not wanting to grow up at all. I enjoy the fact that the store clerks ask my age when I purchase cigarettes. Even though I hardly think I appear to be under eighteen at all, it still comforts me they believe there to be a chance. Tonight I nearly forgot my age and almost blurted out twenty-one as if I really can't keep up with these years. I hesitated, which surprised me. I am finding more and more that many people in their twenties feel so old when it is really the first decade in their life of adulthood. And even though I tend to feel it too I have the need to remind them just how young they still are. But then all I can think of is; what if I am thirty and I still feel like this? Thirty seems like another lifetime to me, nearly impossible, and yet it is only six years away. It seems unreal that I would ever live to be such a complete adult. Six years when it will no longer seem appropriate to call myself a girl. Because I still think of myself as just a girl -- a confused little girl and I'm not sure when I suddenly became a woman but I feel forced into this womanhood in which I am not entirely ready for. On the surface I wait for my breasts to sag and my skin to lag and wonder how it can get any better if my body will eventually show signs it has given up on me. I need more time to f**k up while it is still acceptable and part of an entitled angst. And yet I want to grow. I envision a still soft, because she has rejected the life-induced bitterness, yet strong and hard in all the right places sort of woman who seems too beautiful so she is entirely out of my reach. I don't mind being woman but really I am just not prepared as if I cannot fathom what might make me happy as this adult.

Might it be all the traditional things, yet I think not, but no one wants to be lonely, and so I fear, I fear that I might never be happy; not because of love or failed love, but because I can't stand the thought of the nine-to-five and the house and the kids, la la, happily ever after, as amazing as this might be for the rare few, it appears there should be more to life. I will always want more to life. I need excitement and rushes and new places and things and I am such a f*****g junkie. Addicted to the unknown and to newness, experience, and beauty. And yet I am a faithful lover so this is mostly true with just about everything else yet sometimes I wonder how I am able to withstand the distance. And I can finally admit it's because of the rush. Because passion can never ever die like this and I wonder, I wonder, and I want to f*****g know how real this would all be if we were accessible to one another again. I simply cannot believe anything to be real without questioning it to invisible pieces and this is why I have no god. I want the truth, not more heart aches and missing until I ravage him like a hungry cannibal for flesh. Our love is real but the intensity is still as it was from the beginning, maybe more. Have I perpetuated this and will I ever survive the traditional way?

My cousins have it mapped out just perfectly for them there in the south. They cheered finally when the one went off and married after her stint with rebellion. She is only a year older than me and going the traditional way now; so when will the kids come? -- they all wonder. There are all these tiny children in winter coats prancing around 5th avenue now which is sometimes too adorable for me to take. It touches me in a way that awakens these maternal instincts I never thought I'd ever have, you see, I never liked babies. I watched my friends ooh and ahh over these little creatures and it made me seem dead inside with no reaction. I just could not fake it for I bore no interest. Then there are these rare moments when I see something and wonder how I could ever have a child for I could never quite put myself through loving something, or someone, that much ever again. It would kill me inside to the point where I might become an insane overbearing mother. When we were little I remember sometimes loving my sister like she was my daughter even though I picked a fight with her every now and then. And I can recall plotting to kill the kid who picked on her in first grade. I don't want to ever love someone that much again. I think of the possibility of loving something just a little more than the way I love him, or perhaps not exactly more but very protectively, the product of me and him, and it could make me burst. I feel very guilty of simply being curious to know what it might be like for us to live inside of one human being, but the wonder would never be enough for me to give birth for the wrong reason. I'm already surprised, yet relieved, I am still intact and have not yet exploded by this love. I've never loved anyone the way I love him. I ate his flaws like they were really mine and it made me hurt so that I sometimes couldn't digest them.

I play this game of attach and detach. It can never be normal and for as long as I play I will never be sane. The highs and lows are woven together to resemble the kind of drug I'd have to slowly and excruciatingly wean myself off of. I am not the kind of person to love so distantly -- to love yet find it so hard to touch. I want to touch until I wear us both out into piles of skins, worn and fucked, and melted into. We should be inside one another instead of across planes of earth and miles of soil. Distance was never the true test. I was wrong. It is being as close as possible. The kind of closeness that reveals all secrets and shines a spotlight on flaws because that is real love and true passion when it is for what you will taste every single day, for what can never become a bore, for what you might always discover something new inside another one of the billion cells that make up their skin. I do not know what I want out of this life, and out of this world. I am still all over the god damn place. I'd like more options and different maps. And although I am still young the truth is sometimes I feel twenty or thirty years older, as if I've become too aware of what dreams may really become. Once the fantasy becomes real it dies quickly. And the world disenchants you. Those silly dreams haunt you. Happiness seems so unlikely sometimes because few are ever interested in knowing what happens after the ever after. But I've always wondered about it. Wondered why the happily ever after always included being with someone. I always thought about what might have happened after the beast was no longer a beast, but now a beautiful man, and easier to love. Would she have remained with him if he'd always been the beast. Did Cinderella eventually want to leave her prince? Did Sleeping Beauty finally awake to a nightmare? Or were they all really happy forever, and if they were, why does that seem so boring?