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.