the personal diary of

I am sitting here and I need to work.

I am trying very hard to not have any outward flourishes.

"Outward flourishes." I'm borrowing words now?

That's Hamlet. Well, it's Polonius, and that isn't even what he meant. Also, he is fictional. I'm borrowing words now, from people who never existed, and I'm deliberately misconstruing them, or I am strewing them in ugly ways.

I'm having whole conversations in my head lately, and I am trying to keep it all right up here, and they are relentless and I'm borrowing words for them so that my conversations won't sound entirely like they're just me. A persistent dialogue isn't the same thing as a soliloquy.

I'm also having a lot of sex in my head. I'm staging whole conversations, and I'm having sex, all by myself, all locked right upstairs, and it isn't going anywhere. I am playing all the parts. I am, I'm told, an unfulfilling partner.

I know why I'm having sex in my head. It's because I stopped taking Yaz. I started taking Yaz because I got very stressed out, and my face bloomed like a garden, and I decided I needed to quit smoking and murder my sex drive. Also, to stop drinking. I tried to quit all those things at once: drinking, smoking, sex thinking.

But I am a smoker after all, and three or four weeks ago the stabbing pains started. They were shooting up and down my legs, and I couldn't even walk straight. A cramp had started in my right leg, way up in the thigh, so I put it up on a pillow and tried to pass out. In the night I woke up screaming because the cramp had moved, very abruptly, to my left calf. I kneaded at my leg and I shouted and yelled, and nobody was there except these horrible legs. So I texted my ex-boyfriend to tell him I must be dying. My text woke him up, and he let me know that no I was not.

Maybe I was only interested in discovering whether he were still invested in my health, but I know I was scared, too. I kept picturing little blood clots shooting out of my legs and up to my heart and brain.

So I stopped taking Yaz -- because I only wanted to murder my sex drive! Not myself! It is very hard to concentrate if you are also dead! -- and my sex drive came back after all, and with it, this persistent twitching in or near my left eyeball.

C let me know I am only stressed, and then she told me she had noticed the spots where my jaw is hinged, where I have a million jillion little hormone pimples forming. And I was so embarrassed, because I was wearing my sex hormones right there on my face, and she could see them because I had tied my hair up.

C suggested I go back on Yaz, or something else less blood clotty maybe this time, and she didn't tell me to calm down, but she was thinking it.

My phone battery died a few nights ago, and ultimately I missed out on some important information.

When I went a week without looking at my phone, and that was last week, I missed out on some important information. I'd thought it was nice to be disconnected, and instead I didn't keep up on Mom's whereabouts, and by the time we spoke again, she'd already been admitted to an ER, and she had been released again. Life has a proclivity for moving on without us.

In college, I had this really bad dream. I had this dream before Dad developed dementia, before Mom lost her ability to flex and bend and drive herself around town for enchiladas and hot dogs, but I guess I was already vaguely aware that they were elderly, and so I had this dream.

I dreamt that she had been sending me letters -- like a bill collector! But she is my mother! I think this is how I think about all correspondence, as if people are calling on debts -- and maybe I hadn't been checking my mail, or perhaps I had been, and now her letters were all stacked and sealed, unread.

I ordered the letters by postmark. I opened the first one, and in it, she asked me how I was. She told me about her life, who she'd seen at the grocery, how her hair had been cut. The next one, mailed a few days later, wondered where I was. The next, the next, the next one after. She started describing her health. She tried not to sound too histrionic, but her health was failing.

By the time I am reading the last letters in the pile, her handwriting has devolved into a terrible scrawl.

In actuality, this is the way my father now writes letters which, if they make sense, basically get to the point by just being a signature.

I get to the end of the stack of letters, and they stop suddenly, and I am looking for postmarks now, and then I wake up. That is the bad dream I had in college.

Since then, my anxieties about reading email, checking voicemails, and paying bills have all only worsened.

When my real dad died, I did not know about it for several days. His first love didn't know about it for seven years. There is nothing so awful as not being the first to know something, to find out something everybody else knows, to learn something that has already happened, instead of knowing about it as it is happening.

I worry about our feebleness a lot. I concentrate on how we are breaking.

Smokers smoke because we would like nothing more than to remain alive, and we would probably like to control our own deaths, and hell, even prolong our deaths! There is nothing so Alive as a prolonged death, what with all the waiting, which is all it is anyway, so maybe we are just smoking in the waiting room as we are waiting for one another to die.

Sudden deaths, though, are horrible, even though or especially because they are so, so certain. We would like to be cremated, then -- we would like to be ashes -- because then we have a concrete idea of what will come, with no uncertainties, with none of that morbid withering and wasting-away stuff.

Waiting is always uncertainty, even though the end itself is certain. But how will it arrive? I have read that psychologists do not acknowledge anticipatory grief as real grief, and that grief only really begins once your loved one has completely wasted away. Isn't that nice?

I am sitting here trying to work, but my left eyeball is jiggling in its socket.

When I saw him, my stomach rolled and roiled and bucked, and it felt like being 13 but the discomfort isn't as pleasant as it was when I was 13, because now instead of feeling prickly and jingly, it makes me feel like a terrible person who has a bottle of horrible things in her head that her 13-year old self would never be able to think up, and also there is inexplicable grief.

And he went his own way, and I stayed put until I couldn't stay put anymore, and I jittered over to J. And usually I am a pretty good listener, and just that, but

I don't remember what I said, or if I'd thought to whisper, but I leaned close and told my friend J, whose love life I know about and she knows some or most secret things about mine, a rambling awful tumble-jumble of things: that it just isn't pleasant anymore, that it's horrible, that I'd rather not run into this person by accident anymore, that every time I see him I am coincidentally wearing the same shirt which I do not even wear very often and every time I put it on I hope I won't cross paths with him AGAIN because Jesus it's Christ the same fucking shirt, that happenstantial meetings hurt and feel terrible, that every time I see him I think I am going to cry or die exactly where I am sitting or standing, that I know everything I feel is totally not grounded in reality even slightly, not even slightly, that on exactly this one count I have become a crazy person, a quirk like "I am deathly afraid of dragonflies" and "I compulsively rub my forehead all the time" and "I think about how nice you are and then I miss my left turn or drive onto the curb" and that I am just fixating because it's hard to leave a sure thing and then wander nowhere, and these are not real feelings at all, and IT IS VERY HARD TO FEEL ALIVE but there's the littlest spring in my step, and I go on stupid dates and also one pretty nice one just trying and trying to work this goddamn dreamy not-real thing out of my stupid brain, and I think I said some disastrously unappealing things, or derisive or cruel things about HOW OVER THIS FEELING I AM -- and then, ohhh this part I definitely said aloud -- "I don't think about him once a day, I think about him several times a day, and at this point it is an ILLNESS, a DISEASE."

This is the point in my story where I suddenly have the presence of mind to peek over my shoulder, and wtf.

And then I face J again and balk, and I tell her quietly: "Oh, he's still here."

And J tells me the next thing I said was, "I need to hide behind you," which I do not remember at all, and I don't remember anything I said before that, either. And I thought I was going to throw up everywhere. I looked at J, and she was laughing so hard that her eyes were wet.

"How wonderful would it be," I said to J then, "to overhear someone describing her affection for you as an affliction! How cathartic," I said, "now that I can let go of all of this, because he will never speak to me again, of course." Because he knows I have a BIG FAT GOSSIP MOUTH and I have dotted the I's and signed my full given name on Insane.

"He didn't hear anything," J said.

"Oh, really? You think he didn't notice?"

"That doesn't sound like you at all!" Ashley said to me when I described attempting to crawl away from a situation on my hands and knees because I cannot shut my giant goddamn mouth. Ashley thought I was a real smooth cucumber until then.

I stayed awake for 45 hours. At my job, I cried.

"I need to never ever think about this," I said. "I have so much fucking work to do."

I worked a lot. When I wasn't working, I went to my job. I felt haunted. I tried to understand the difference between self-sabotage and bad luck.

I worked so much that, the next time I looked at my cell phone, I had 17 new voicemails. I didn't listen to all of them, but my movies are "really, really, really very late, like, we really do need them back late," and my mom was admitted to the ER, in the hospital for a couple days, and then readmitted to the nursing home where she has been living.

The heart can hibernate, but all the rest of humankind marches forward I guess

On Friday morning, I introduced myself as "Nik's ex-girlfriend," in those words, and it was as if I had kicked the wind out of the room. And I thought I was going to throw up then, too, except that I felt wonderful.

"What's wrong?" J asked me tonight.

"Nothing, what's wrong with you," I said, dour.

She eyed my laptop. "Let's read our horoscopes," she recommended.

"I already read mine!" I said. She read me mine anyway.