Indecision.

At this point, now that numerous people know, I have no idea where to go with it all. I mean, I know what all the options are now, but I'm not sure which path I should pursue. Most people have an opinion about it and want to help. That, however, is not something I would want to put anyone else through. I mean hell, I hardly want to do it myself. But I feel incredibly guilty about it all. What if I wasn't the only one? What if there were more after me? I never reported anything so they were never stopped. If they did find other women or girls, I'm going to feel terribly responsible. I already do. But I'm being selfish. I don't want to do this all again. I wish I could talk to someone who has been through something similar. See what they have to say...how they've handled it. I suppose I will just carry on with this blogging nonsense until I come to some conclusion. Or completely freak out. Whichever comes first.

I survived!

Another year of Christmas insanity with my family. In theory, if I get into TFA, I won't have to be here for next year's festivities. That would be astounding. As of right now, I am just sitting on the couch watching the snow blow past the window. It's actually quite nice when paired with a new pair of socks and a mug of tea. 

Another Day

It gets almost tedious to receive grades each semester. I just wish I had less to worry about like the rest of my peers. I know a 3.2 isn't necessarily bad, but when you sit there and watch as person after person post about there 3.5's and higher on facebook you start to wonder why you're not doing as well as everyone else.

Beyond that, life goes on. I've told a few more people about my past...and while it gets easier to tell people I still feel terrible including them in this crap. I feel like I owe quite a few people an explanation for how I've been for the last several years, but I also feel horribly guilty about putting this on them too. I was almost easier to just carry it all myself. Everyone is so kind about it....I just don't know what to do. Quite a few are of the opinion that I should finally report it, but this makes me extremely nervous. I don't want to relive the entire experience and answer all of those questions and I don't want other people finding out. Right now it's still in my control, but if I choose to take this path it won't be. I don't know what to do. 

Break Book List

1] Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
- Gilbert Sorrentino

2] American Gods
- Neil Gaiman

3] Revolting Youth
- CD Payne

4] The Fifty Year Sword
- Mark Z. Danielewski

5] Fool
- Christopher Moore

6] Blankets
- Craig Thompson

7] Palestine
- Joe Sacco

8] Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir)
- Jenny Lawson

9] A Confederacy of Dunces
- John Kennedy Toole

10] The Great Gatsby
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

11] Sexing the Cherry
- Jeanette Winterson

12] Friends With Boys
- Faith Erin Hicks

13] Young and Revolting
- CD Payne

14] Every You, Every Me
- David Levithan

"I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares. For a while there I tried every pill imaginable. Anything to curb the fear. Excedrin PMs, Melatonin, L-tryptophan, Valium, Vicodin, quite a few member of the barbatal family. A pretty extensive list, frequently mixed, often matched, with shots of bourbon, a few lung rasping bong hits, sometimes even the vaporous confidence-trip of cocaine. None of it helped. I think it's pretty safe to assume there's no lab sophisticated enough yet to synthesize the kind of chemicals I need. A Nobel Prize to the one who invents that puppy. I'm so tired. Sleep's been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose. Sadly though, I'm not looking forward to the prospect. I say "sadly" because there was a time when I actually enjoyed sleeping. In fact I slept all the time." 

-Johnny Truant, House of Leaves

/High-PitchedHumming...

...is the sound my anxiety makes.

And it has been the perpetual soundtrack to the last two weeks.

One would think that I would learn; semester after semester, I overload myself with far too many responsibilities. Some are out of necessity, some are voluntary. This semester is no different. I actually think this semester is a bit worse than usual. I've started online counseling through RAINN and it really just takes it out of me. I understand that they're just trying to help, but reliving that crap bit by bit is just inimical. How is this supposed to help me? Most nights it ends in minor to moderate panic attacks, which means no sleep the rest of the night. This doesn't bode well for a 5:30 am wake-up time to drive to CD East and be an alert, responsible, pre-student teacher.

On top of that joy, I've been attempting to stay afloat in my five classes, pre-student teaching, and work. My chem professor is frustrating the crap out of me, methods is challenging, math is not my subject, Faulkner is....well....Faulkner, and I have stupid classmates in conservation.Pre-student teaching is really fun; this is definitely the profession that I want to be in, but the constant driving back and forth is really killing me...and my bank account. Stupid gas.

There are many times that I wish I could have the lives of some of my classmates...have my parents pay for all of my college, bills, housing, hell even gas (forrrrreals...this is the status of a friend of mine who claims he is "too stressed" and/or "too tired" to do things like attend class/meetings. This is the shit that makes my anxiety go, "ahhhhhhhhhhhhh"). But, I know that if my life were like that, I wouldn't be me. I think that my situation has made me more independent and self-sufficient than what I could have been. And while I didn't/don't care for the crappier parts of my life, I still appreciate that they are what they are.

I think it's just the overwhelming combination of all of this. Throw in the TFA interview, prepping for Las Vegas, trying to pay off my surgery, and life in general (normal bills, boyfriend, social life?) and you have the perfect recipe for a mental catastrophe. I see that it's now 10:30....I should really get started on these papers I need to grade for Monday.

Public Safety Announcement: Remember to BREATHE

The Past.

We each have our own personal hells. I share mine with 1 in 6 women and approximately 92,000 men a year in the US alone. It's been a long time coming, but I've finally come clean with my past to the people I care about. It's been suggested that I write about it in an attempt to let some of it go. I feel comfortable doing it in this medium as it's likely to be found by either people I do not know, or people I want to have the opportunity to read it. So here we go and bear with me....some of this will be explicit and triggering for many people:

Almost everyday after school, I would get off the bus and walk straight to the library in my town. I'd stay until around 5pm and then begin walking back so that I would be home before my mother and father should they decide to come straight home instead of heading to the bar. On this day, I had just passed the gated retention pond and was about half way home when I heard voices off to my side. I didn't see them coming, but the next thing I knew, one of them was grabbing me by the hair and covering my mouth with his other hand while dragging me into a garage. Once inside, the taller man who was holding me shoved me to the ground and starting taking my clothes off while the shorter man kneeled down on my neck and gagged me with what looked like an old washcloth. When I tried to yell, one of slapped me across the face and it was at this point that I realized it was pretty much fruitless to try and struggle; I was outnumbered and a third of the size of these me. I eventually just laid there praying to God that they wouldn't kill me and wishing the concrete ground would just swallow me whole.

Unfortunately, it didn't. The taller man went first. I watched long enough to see him strip his pants and put on a condom. He looked me in the eyes and said, "let's do this". I closed my eyes and braced myself for the worst. Forgetting about the gag, I attempted to shriek at the pain I felt when he started; it hurt far more than I possibly could have imagined. It felt as if he had torn through every organ in my lower abdomen, and then it happened over and over again. Finally, what seemed like hours later, he seemed to finish with me and stood up and pulled up his pants. At this point I had completely given up on God and the concrete floor swallowing me up. Little did I know, they were not nearly done with me. The smaller man strode over from where he had been standing a few feet away and started undoing his belt. He got down on his knees and smirked as he pulled my arms above my head. Holding my wrists down with what seemed to be all of his weight, he started on me too. Over and over and over again. It seemed to stretch on into eternity. He pulled out and I thought they were finally done. I was wondering what they were going to do with me when the man on me sat back on his heels and looked over at the taller man who had been just standing over us, watching, and said, "toss that over here, let's have some fun". The taller man tossed him what looked like an old wooden bat from off a shelf. He caught it and pressed it into my neck saying, "if you breathe a word of this to anyone we will find you and do this again. We know where you live and that your friend lives in the house behind yours. Tell anyone and we'll do it to her too." He pulled the bat off and replaced it with his hand, choking me while he shoved the bat's handle into me over and over. It must have been an old one, as it felt like it was splintering inside of me. Eventually, the blistering pain subsided and he stood up. Tossing the bat to the side, he pulled me off the floor and held my face to him with both hands. He said, "tell anyone and we will find you, understand?" I nodded, shaking. he released me and instructed me to get dressed and get out. In disbelief, I pulled my shirt down, jammed my legs into my jeans, and fled. Sprinting down the alley, I heard a truck start up somewhere behind me. I ran even faster, the adrenaline flowing through my body. I didn't stop until I was in my bathroom behind several locked doors. Fortunately for me, no one was home yet, so it didn't look suspicious. At first I sat in the corner and just shook. Then I showered. And showered. And showered some more....I never really felt entirely clean. While I showered, I contemplated going to the police or telling my mother and father. But fear outweighed logic; fear outweighed logic for over a decade. It was around then that I realized I had left my newly-borrowed library books and sweatshirt on the concrete floor of that garage. Clearly, I had no intentions of going back for them.

For the next week or two I spent as little time as possible at my house. I didn't want them to come looking for me or my family/friends. I did a lot of research on rape survivors and their stories and how they coped. I fell into a lame pattern of stealing my parents' alcohol [not difficult to do for those of you who do not know me] and quickly figured out that it wasn't for me. I could only do it at night and at home, so I found something I could conceal and do pretty much anywhere and anytime I needed to escape. I started cutting, and it has been my vice for the last decade. I've been clean of that for the last couple of months...so I suppose that's something. I guess sometimes, when you're just not given the proper tools to love and respect yourself, when you feel more alone than you could have possibly imagined, you do desperate things. Things you cannot change, but things that make you who you are nonetheless. And I guess this is who I am. Fortunately, I've finally found people that I trust enough to tell this story to and from them I've started to accept that this is a thing that happened to me and is over. Now if only the night terrors would cease and desist.

So yeah. Here we are. That's all I have for y'all. If you just read all of this, I apologize for making your day that much suckier.

Faulkner

"She had looked a little alive, but now she looked like she had collapsed, like she had been made out of a lot of little thin dry light sticks notched together and braced with cord, and now the cord had broken and all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor, and somebody had spread a clean and faded calico dress over them." 

C. Bukowski

Find what you love and let it kill you.

J. Austen

I am half agony, half hope.

Is college worth it?

"You will also have spent a lot of time writing papers and attending classes and going to supposedly epic frat parties that are never actually very fun because even as you're dancing and drinking and talking to vaguely attractive strangers there's this omnipresent gnawing feeling in your gut that nothing means anything and you feel this endless existential isolation...or was that just me?"

-John Green

Dear Todd Akin,

I am writing to you tonight about rape. It is 2 AM and I am unable to sleep here in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am in Bukavu at the City of Joy to serve and support and work with hundreds, thousands of women who have been raped and violated and tortured from this ceaseless war for minerals fought on their bodies.

I am in Congo but I could be writing this from anywhere in the United States, South Africa, Britain, Egypt, India, Philippines, most college campuses in America. I could be writing from any city or town or village where over half a billion women on the planet are raped in their lifetime.

Mr. Akin, your words have kept me awake.

As a rape survivor, I am reeling from your recent statement where you said you misspoke when you said that women do not get pregnant from legitimate rape, and that you were speaking "off the cuff."

Clarification. You didn't make some glib throw away remark. You made a very specific ignorant statement clearly indicating you have no awareness of what it means to be raped. And not a casual statement, but one made with the intention of legislating the experience of women who have been raped. Perhaps more terrifying: it was a window into the psyche of the GOP.

You used the expression "legitimate" rape as if to imply there were such a thing as "illegitimate" rape. Let me try to explain to you what that does to the minds, hearts and souls of the millions of women on this planet who experience rape. It is a form of re-rape. The underlying assumption of your statement is that women and their experiences are not to be trusted. That their understanding of rape must be qualified by some higher, wiser authority. It delegitimizes and undermines and belittles the horror, invasion, desecration they experienced. It makes them feel as alone and powerless as they did at the moment of rape.

When you, Paul Ryan and 225 of your fellow co-sponsors play with words around rape suggesting only "forcible" rape be treated seriously as if all rapes weren't forcible, it brings back a flood of memories of the way the rapists played with us in the act of being raped -- intimidating us, threatening us,muting us. Your playing with words like "forcible" and "legitimate" is playing with our souls which have been shattered by unwanted penises shoving into us, ripping our flesh, our vaginas, our consciousness, our confidence, our pride, our futures.

Now you want to say that you misspoke when you said that a legitimate rape couldn't get us pregnant. Did you honestly believe that rape sperm is different than love sperm, that some mysterious religious process occurs and rape sperm self-destructs due to its evilcontent? Or, were you implying that women and their bodies are somehow responsible for rejecting legitimate rape sperm, once again putting the onus on us? It would seem you were saying that getting pregnant after a rape would indicate it was not a "legitimate" rape.

Here's what I want you to do. I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you are on your bed or up against a wall or locked in a small suffocating space. Imagine being tied up there and imagine some aggressive, indifferent, insane stranger friend or relative ripping off your clothes and entering your body -- the most personal, sacred, private part of your body -- and violently, hatefully forcing themself into you so that you are ripped apart. Then imagine that stranger's sperm shooting into you and filling you and you can't get it out. It is growing something in you. Imagine you have no idea what that life will even consist of, spiritually made in hate, not knowing the mental or health background of the rapist.

Then imagine a person comes along, a person who has never had that experience of rape, and that person tells you, you have no choice but to keep that product of rape growing in you against your will and when it is born it has the face of your rapist, the face of the person who has essentially destroyed your being and you will have to look at the face every day of your life and you will be judged harshly if you cannot love that face.

I don't know if you can imagine any of this (leadership actually requires this kind of compassion), but if you are willing to go to the depth of this darkness, you will quickly understand that there is NO ONE WHO CAN MAKE THAT CHOICE to have or not have the baby, but the person carrying that baby herself.

I have spent much time with mothers who have given birth to children who are the product of rape. I have watched how tortured they are wrestling with their hate and anger, trying not to project that onto their child.

I am asking you and the GOP to get out of my body, out of my vagina, my womb, to get out of all of our bodies. These are not your decisions to make. These are not your words to define.

Why don't you spend your time ending rape rather than redefining it? Spend your energy going after those perpetrators who so easily destroy women rather than parsing out manipulative language that minimizes their destruction.

And by the way you've just given millions of women a very good reason to make sure you never get elected again, and an insanely good reason to rise.

#ReasonToRise

Eve Ensler
Bukavu, Congo

Summer Gaming....I Wish!

I know the semester is beginning when my bank account starts draining...

Books bought. [Got all for under $200/Could've bought them all from Ship used for $644]
Semester paid.
Parking pass ordered.
Backpack narrowed down to two.
Possibly new laptop in the works.
Fran inspected, fixed, and equipped with new tires.
Hospital bill to be determined.

Not really ready to return to reality. Enjoying California weather way too much. The only thing that makes me want to go back to the east coast is to see the boy....one more week! This is my last semester of classes though, so that's good. Then there's just student teaching standing between me and the real world. /panic /panic /panic

Hello hospital bill; hello denied credit card application.

Les jeux sont faint. Nous sommes fucked.

"Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name... 

...And then the nightmares will begin."

California!

For the third consecutive summer, I am spending time in California with the family that I nanny for :D We are back in the same house in Ojai that we stayed in last year. The weather is absolutely wonderful and so is the town. We've only been here for a few days but it is still incredibly wonderful to be back over here. Additionally, I've been able to catch up with a few of my ISV friends! Aprwil stopped by last night and we went off to the bar and then dessert at a Mexican place. Tuesday, I'm planning on heading down to Irvine to visit Jen for the night. And at some point, Nick is going to come down from his remote Air Force base to visit like he did last summer. Perhaps we will do the beach and dinner just like we did last year; that was rather enjoyable :) 

We have a few fun things that we've already done and plan to do yet on our visit out here. A few nights ago, we went down to Santa Barbara for a 5k called Night Moves. LA and G ran the 5k and the kids and I played on the beach and went on a mile hike up the hill to a park. I'd not been to that particular beach before; it was really beautiful. We stayed until sunset, which made it even better.

 Tomorrow, I only work until noon and I plan to just backpack around Ojai on one of the bikes. I'm thinking about going up to an open-air bookstore called Bart's Books for a few hours; I'd like to ride the bike path that winds the whole way down to Ventura [though, I won't be biking the entire way there and back]; and I'm going to get some school work/reading/knitting done...perhaps at one of the parks. It's rather late and it's been a long day...so sleep should probably occur soon.


On a completely unrelated note: my knife wounds seem to be healing up fairly well. All of the stitches and such have fallen out and now I'm just waiting on the itching and redness and little obnoxious bumps to go away...then all will be well in my world. Well, except for the hospital bill that I got today x.x

Uncertainty

I spent many years wondering if it was the past or just me that made sex such an irrevocably painful and unendurable experience.  Over the last few months I've discovered it was a solid combination of both. I was fortunately able to find a wonderful guy who listens and is able to (and does) treat me gently. I am incredibly happy with him :)

I was also able to get a much needed surgery that will hopefully (once everything is healed and back up and running) take away a lot of the pain that I previously experienced during sex and every month. Here's to hoping that everything turns out alright in the long run. On a completely unrelated note: California this time next week!

Knife wounds

Here are my incisions post-surgery:

Belly button incision

Right abdomen incision

Left abdomen incisions

Everything is still really sore and swollen...especially the right side.

Graphic Image Warning:

Below, you'll find images of my uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and cysts with the endometrial lesions and cells....painful AND gross!

Left: Dark spots are endometrial cells.  Right: My uterus.

Dooooom cyst

Removing lesions with da vinci robot

Uterus/Removing lesions

Same as above.

Left: After cyst. Right: Cyst about to be burned out.

The anxiety sets in...

Surgery is set for this Wednesday morning and the anxious panic has already begun. I realize that this is something that I need to do and something that is supposed to make me feel better in the long run, but frankly, I'm scared that I'm just going to hear bad news after the surgery is finished. Realistically, the only good news that can come from this is that they were able to clean me out a bit and I should be good for a *few* years until I need to get it done again, as endometriosis is a disease that cannot be cured or ever entirely removed from the body. Thus, it keeps growing and spreading about my various organs--huzzah, huzzah. Furthermore, the surgery is being done by a mildly frightening looking robot surgical machine...it looks like this:

I mean...really...I'm going to be unconscious under all those probe-y pokey looking things while the doctor plays a fairly realistic video game to remove all the lesions and cysts... No bueno. 

If you're at all curious-- endometriosis is a progressive disease that affects 5-10% of women. It is characterized by the presence of endometrial tissue on the ovaries, fallopian tubes, or other abnormal sites, causing pain or infertility. Mine presents with both dyspareunia and secondary dysmenorrhea; this makes life a bit of a living hell. Additionally, my endometriosis is paired with both adenomyosis and endometritis. 

Supposedly, this surgery will increase my chances at becoming at least mildly fertile, though my doctor is not very hopeful about that bit.... I found this handy flowchart that illustrates this whole process:

I followed the pain side as I have yet to even attempt getting pregnant. The path I've followed is Pain > Moderate to severe > Laparoscopic diagnosis [wednesday] > Surgical excision and ablation of lesions [wednesday] > Immediate postsurgical therapy with danazol, OCPs, GnRH agonists or progestins [post-surgery].....somewhere between pain and the laparoscopy I had to sit through an internal ultrasound...which, incidentally, hurts like hell. 

Anyway, I'll stop bitching for now. Gotta get some sleep as I'm headed to Bethlehem tomorrow with Leigh Ann for this Knitting event thing at a local brewery :) I'm excited.

My last post was 100% correct!

Invasive procedure next week....surgery the following week. Awesome.

Sigh.

Tomorrow is gonna suck.

“By now you’ve probably noticed that except when safely contained by quotes, Zampanò always steers clear of such questionable four-letter language. This instance in particular proves that beneath all that cool psuedo-academic hogwash lurked a very passionate man who knew how important it was to say “fuck” now and then, and say it loud too, relish its syllabic sweetness, its immigrant pride, a great American epic word really, starting at the lower lip, often the very front of the lower lip, before racing all the way to the back of the throat, where it finishes with a great blast, the concussive force of the K catching up then with the hush of the F already on its way, thus loading it with plenty of offense and edge and certainly ambiguity. FUCK. A great by-the-bootstrap prayer or curse if you prefer, depending on how you look at it, or use it, suited perfectly for hurling at the skies or at the world, or sometimes, if said just right, for uttering with enough love and fire, the woman beside you melts inside herself, immersed in all that word-heat.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

HoL

To put it politely, no fucking way.
I know what it means to go mad.
I'll die before I go there,
But first I have to find out if that's where I'm really heading.
I've got to stop blinking in the face of my fear.
I must hear what I scream.
I must remember what I dream.

We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.

Things that are relevant:

Such a wonderful day was had today. Simple things like working out, spending time reading by the creek, dinner, meandering about a bookstore, and finishing it all up with some movies make me a happy girl. Another relaxing and enjoyable day awaits for tomorrow. Here's to hoping tonight's sleep is improved from the last two nights.

On a completely unrelated note, I've already completed three of my twenty-some books for this summer!

Things that have happened/are happening/will continue to happen:

For the last year or so, I've been having a lot of issues when it comes to sleep. Whereas sleep was once simple, wonderful, absolute escape, it is now something that I dread every night. I know what's coming; my body knows what's coming. I just don't want to deal with it every night. I will say, when the boy spends the night, it's not so bad. Apparently the early stages of my thrashing wake him up and he is able to calm me down before it escalates any further. Unfortunately, when he's not there it is pure, unadulterated hell. It begins with some severe nightmares. These cause my body to start twitching and occasionally thrashing in my bed. Sometimes I'll just wake up in the middle of this and just need to wait a half hour or so to calm down. Other times, I'll wake up in the middle of REM sleep where my muscles are still in sleep paralysis. Thus, I am panicking from my nightmare, but further, I am unable to move any part of my body. This does nothing to help calm me down. In the last two weeks, these nightmares seemed to have increased in both frequency and intensity. Unfortunately, I am unable to spend any nights with the boy as we both work two completely different jobs and it is impossible. It's clear to me the reason for the sudden increase in night terrors, but there is honestly nothing I can do about it that isn't going to also piss off those closest to me. I suppose I will just have to continue riding them out until they give a little. I can put up with a lot of crap, but sleep was always an efficient escape. I'd like it back.

Cassandra Clare: Like a Boss

We read to know that we are not alone. So said CS Lewis. We read because shared experience is more bearable. We read to know that even if we don’t know people like ourselves in real life, they are out there in the world. We read to be in the heads of those people. We read, if we love books, because there is no one among us who hasn’t had a book or a character in a book pick up the fragmented pieces of our broken hearts and glue them back together just by being like us.

Rape myths are so dangerous because in a large part they are aimed at women and girls, and when girls buy into them, they buy themselves a lifetime of believing that if they are sexually assaulted it is their fault. It is their fault for dressing too scantily, for getting too drunk at a party, for being too pretty. Rape has nothing to do with being "pretty". The two ideas shouldn't even be in the same sentence. It is these kinds of myths that lead to the thought process that would assume that a scene of violent rape was about showing the heroine as desirable. That assaulted and punched in the face was a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Rape culture tells us women "want it." The truth tells us that they don't.

The prospect of change is a many-fanged beast, my dear.

Yesterday started off so well, yet it ended so horribly. There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

I suppose I will spend the remainder of the day reading The Fault in our Stars again....

"There were always more bad guys to kill and good guys to save. New wars started even before the old ones were won. I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction." 

-Hazel Grace Lancaster

“We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.” 

― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human

Paper Towns

Listen, kid. This is what happens...These kids are like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and stain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again...Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.

The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there...Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother or a father, or God forbid both, and after a while you can't even see them individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon. But then every now and again you talk to some big-eyed kid with too much hair for his head and you want to lie to him because he seems like a good kid. And you feel bad for this kid, because the only thing worse than the sky full of balloons you see is what he sees: a clear blue day interrupted by just the one balloon. But once that string gets cut, kid, you cab't uncut it...

I mean, at some point you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and see that you floated away too.

Paper Towns

“Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean look at it: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for 18 years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”

—	John Green

"There is no bitterness like that of a man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost." -Salman Rushdie

Time Coughs When You Would Kiss…

On the incorrectness of forever…
As I Walked Out One Evening  
   - by W. H. Auden


As I walked out one evening,
  Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
  Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
  I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
  ”Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

“I’ll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,
  For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
  And the first love of the world.”

But all the clocks in the city
  Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
  You cannot conquer Time.

“In the burrows of the Nightmare
  Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
  And coughs when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry
  Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
  To-morrow or to-day.

“Into many a green valley
  Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
  And the diver’s brilliant bow.

“O plunge your hands in water,
  Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
  And wonder what you’ve missed.

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
  The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
  A lane to the land of the dead.

“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
  And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
  And Jill goes down on her back.

“O look, look in the mirror?
  O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
  Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window
  As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
  With your crooked heart.”

It was late, late in the evening,
  The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
  And the deep river ran on.

“We’re behaving like characters in a cheap horror movie, she thought dismally, staying when we know we should go, poking where we have no business poking. True enough, she supposed… except wasn’t that what people did? Wasn’t that why, when Richie Judkins had come home in a really badass ear-ripping mood, Little Miss Cynthia had still been there? Wasn’t that what most of the bad stuff in the world was about, staying when you knew damned well you should go, pushing on when you knew you should cut and run? Wasn’t that, in the last analysis, why so many people liked cheap horror movies? Because they recognized the scared kids who refused to leave the haunted house even after the murders started as themselves?”


-Stephen King

That was essentially the worst possible outcome of tonight's night class. Holy shit. I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap. Probably not even real.

Writing:

"Often it is the only thing between you and impossibility.no drink, no woman's love, no wealth can match it.

nothing can save you except writing. It keeps the walls from failing. the hordes from closing in. It blasts the darkness.

Writing is the ultimate psychiatrist, the kindliest god of all the gods. Writing stalks death. It knows no quit. and writing laughs at itself, at pain.

it is the last expectation, the last explanation. that's what it is. "

-Bukowski

‎"It was my sword. I knew when the handle melted beneath my fingers and the blade shivered familiarly along my arm and into my past." - 50 Year Sword

"Most of us can be broken by just the possibility of what might happen." -Anil's Ghost

The angles of your wrists
preserve a certain mystery,
unknown by any lips
or written down in history.

To measure their degree
would solve the oldest questions —
providence and alchemy
answered in your gestures.

But god and gold will never rival
the way your fingers curl.
They hold my breath’s arrival
like a rare and undiscovered pearl.

Maybe it comes from all those little faults you start noticing, like cracks in your skin, wrinkles? And they stare at you in the most unwavering faces that ease into your eyes, pouring against your ribs like smooth whiskey, except this time it’s tequila and you laugh at yourself, knowing each night will lift the haze from your eyes, yet it isn’t completely gone just yet. So you stare at the fixtures of lights blending outside your only window, where your good soldiers rest for duty tomorrow on the windowsill, each second ticketing the sound of reality crashing in full when finally the rush of color overwhelms your senses and the light blinds you like another fragmented memory of a swimming pool in suburban Georgia, where the hot and sticky heat washes over you like honey, sweet and savoring and glistening, but the beast still stirs within thick fur, jagged claws and jagged fangs, each second bringing him closer to your wall and door and frame and you feel it on your neck, its red eyes reflecting the fires outside, knowing its claws are digging within your flesh and you scream, scream, scream, scream until the blood boils deep within your veins and all that is staring at you is the stale warmth of mid-winter sunshine and it feels like a dream.

This much though I’m sure of: I’m alone in hostile territories with no clue why they’re hostile or how to get back to safe havens, an Old Haven, a lost haven, the temperature dropping, the hour heaving & pitching towards a profound darkness, while before me my idiotic amaurotic Guide laughs, actually cackles is more like it, lost in his own litany of inside jokes, completely out of his head, out of focus too, zonules of Zinn, among other things, having snappy long ago like piano wires, leaving me with absolutely no sound way to determine where the hell I’m going, though right now going to hell seems like a pretty sound bet.