Day: February 18, 2005

The owner of Kidzworld has found some of the pictures I have on-line. I’m of rather mixed reactions, part of me is complimented by the fact that he commented with the word “lovely” and the other is considering a quiet panic because, well, this is my boss. The man who signs the cheques but doesn’t quite understand what HTML is. He sends terrible forwards about once a week. Golf jokes, articles on marketing written by people who don’t quite understand the shifting morass which is the internet. And that, your honour, is how I met the farmers daughter.

Downstairs the whores are yelling outside, shouting at each other and slamming the front door. One of them is drunk, cursing loudly. They’re calling each other cheap, it’s an argument of verbal bitchslaps, they’re being nasty about sucking dick. I wish I could carry the simplicity of their insults in my conversation, there’s a certain filthy purity I can’t access, it’s no vocabulary required. I’m thinking about a night I had in Hollywood. Driving with Alastair up by Mulholland, how it was thick night lit simply by glimpses of the sprawling city and expensive driveways launching off like winding airstrips which went for miles. I can imagine these women there, stranded in the darkness, standing by the road in spandex shirts and tiny skirts over clunky shoes.

I thought I could do something and now I’m beginning to fear that I cannot. I thought I could manage. This is a serious fear, this is what you were terrified of when you were four in the dark. I didn’t know until the second time I began crying. There was no spark, only my every day I call normal. For two contiguous days this week, I didn’t leave the house, only sent out calls and letters, trying to find some reason to step out from my door. No answer. I’m not strong enough to treat the train station like an airport every day. There are no luminous letters on the inside of my skull, only gray like a latent Vancouver day crying out for harsher light. I’m so good at justice, I’m queen pragmatic, but I’m slipping. Looking at my needs out of the corner of my eye has been dangerous, it’s getting harder to hold myself at arms length. Dots are connecting, tracing a picture which can only be described as impractical. An image full of unforgivable insurmountable fact. Finally when I’m not being punished from without, I’m castigating myself. There is no wall to throw myself against, my nails have already been broken. That’s my trick, you see, to never feeling anger, instead refashioning it into sharp sadness, to aim inward. Too much I feel like knives. Enough is red shifting, moving faster into something I can’t reach. Enough procreating, enough losing patience with quiescence, enough infatuated with being unable to be found. If I wore make-up, I could create a mask, but there’s nothing to hide now. I still live as an aside. It was self betrayal to ask for time. Suspension, disbelief, until everything, and crash. I can’t explain how silence is killing me.

I’ve started the steps required to leave the country. A letter is being sent to my grandmother for her marriage certificate, my passport is to be re-issued.

I can’t breathe intermission. I need to be real.

I have no history, no structure to build myself on. I’ve always wanted a home but all I have are people. Most of the time it’s not enough, I don’t think it’s how humans are made to be. I have the distinct feeling that everything I remember could have happened to anyone else, that none of it attaches to me except as some sort of vague narrative for me to tell. There’s hardly any emotion, as if I’m looking backward in sepia, not colour. It’s not my history. I’m only made of now. I suspect that I was made a little wrong, a tiny piece defective. The root structure never took hold, I never found anything to care about. I talked with two medical types at the bus-stop this evening. One’s a molecular biologist, the other an E.R. doctor. One of them said, “Everyone has dreams,” and the other nodded in complete agreement while something inside me screamed for one. I’m constantly feeling young and stupid while the people around me seem to know what they’re doing. They find gossip enthralling and their passions engrossing. I feel so empty, like something hollowed me out and didn’t leave anything left.

I manage to care about people but there are friends who’ve known me for years who’ve only recently begun believing that. My friend Shane used to call me his Ice Princess. It picked up and passed around because it apparently fit so well. I would answer to it on the street. Now I seem to have shaken at least that off, but I’m left with concern. When everything pours out, when I find a direction for my affection, it floods me. I am blinded by it and filled from fingertip to fingertip like my blood carries it like an infection. I think about my fathers madness, how if I concentrated enough, I could see his visions. It felt like this, like release. I remember being six and looking up to see the ghost of my half mother standing by the wall. How close is love to insanity when it hurts this much? I need to learn how to operate like it seems that everyone else does. They have goals and hobbies and reasons for being.

I only feel like I’m waiting.