The fire in your heart is out.

I don't even want a boyfriend. I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time, and thinks I'm the best person in the world, and wants to have sex with only me.

I had the most bizarre dream last night. I was walking down 12th avenue on the way to get a coffee. A lady was biking along the road, a wire trailer fastened to the back full of cans, a wicker basket on the front full of flowers.  She wore layer upon layer of tattered cloth, her hair a matted mess underneath her oversized hat. Her face was adorned with well-earned lines and black charcoal. I remember watching her pedal for some time until she stopped her bicycle in the middle of traffic, swung her leg over, got off, and lay down right in the middle of the street. She lay down and outstretched her arms to the heavens as if to accept her inescapable fortune. Whether or not she intended to meet with fate at that exact second, or whether she was trying to prove a point remains a mystery to me. Her dull grey eyes gave not even the slightest indication. She looked neither sad nor manic and unhinged. If anything she looked, to a certain extent, determined. The two furry caterpillars above her eyes inched stubbornly closer to each other in a look of resolution.  But at that point an SUV came barreling towards her. It began to slow, realizing as it drew nearer what the large black mass in the middle of the road was, but then, as if to prove its own point, ran over her. Slowly. Agonizingly. Front wheel, then back. I covered my ears in anticipation of a bone-chilling wail, but there was none. Everything was silent. The world was silent.

I woke up and it was as if I was taking my first breath of air as an infant, or maybe like I had spent my entire life underwater and I was just relearning how to use my lungs. I felt very confused and I remember thinking "oh that's right, I'm alive". And then I remember thinking what a strange feeling it was to have forgotten this very real, very obvious, very inescapable fact. 

Sleep inertia followed me around most of the day. I lost huge chunks of time; one minute it was 10 am, and the next minute it was late into the afternoon and I was still sitting in the exact same position.

I need a better distraction. Or maybe someone to talk to.

I gave my everything, for all the wrong things.

Today I am a slave to my anxiety. 

And I can't say I'm sorry for loving you and hating myself.

Quoi qu'il advienne.

I am breathing. I am breathing and this is highly unusual because I am also dreaming; and in dreams you are not normally so hyper aware. But there I am, standing under the soft white glow of the streetlamp, surveying my chest as it rises and falls while a thick, shapeless smoke expels from my mouth. I feel my lungs inflate but I also see them inflate as if a third eye has taken residency at the apex of my diaphragm. Molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange across my capillaries and the thin membrane of my alveoli. I am watching a million of my physiological functions take place all at once; DNA replicating, RNA translating, heart pumping, blood circulating, neurons firing. I am everywhere but nowhere in particular. I am very small, like an atom, but I am large enough to see the entire picture too. I am so large I extend outwards into the real world and I watch myself sleep. 

---

Today I woke up ready to be bad-tempered and full of self-commiseration. My alarm went off at 5:15 AM and I wanted to throw it across the room and shout obscenities at it until someone heard my call and turned back time so I could get, "just another hour even!". My stomach was so angry at me; the stress of this thing and that, and the stress of not eating, and the stress of wondering why I wasn't eating. It growled loudly at me but I had no appetite to appease it so I simply washed the sleep out of my eyes and dressed for work. I placed my feet in my shoes one at a time, muttering under my breath, furrowing my brow, pleading with my stomach: "if you would just settle down, maybe I could feed you!".  I walked out of my house; it was cold and it was dark and, "why should the sun get to sleep in while I can't?" I cursed the empty streets and dark windows and I cursed the sun for being asleep. "Why should anyone get to sleep in while I can't?" When I arrived at work I was so driven with an all-encompassing rage that I threw myself into my tasks with a vigor unrivalled by that of my coworkers; past and present. I fed the dogs, swept, mopped, let them outside. I greeted each customer with a smile the likes of which you have never seen on someone harbouring such emotions. I made sure no mistakes were made. Applications were filed, emails were answered, dishes and clothes and dog paws were washed. I ran up and downstairs, scrubbing whatever there was to scrub while on the phone and petting three canines at once. I rescued an Australian Shepard from what could have been it's very demise and in doing so received the brunt of it's teeth on my cheek. I didn't even flinch. I bled. Surrounded by howling dogs and an icy breeze, I stood in the warehouse bleeding; wearing my wound and my blood and my heartbreak and all of my anger like a badge that I earned from a hard-fought battle. I was the only human soul in that building and I felt so alive and liberated; finally the walls came crumbling down and took all of my composure with them. I turned the music up and I howled. I howled with my face still bleeding and my heart still broken and my stomach still twisted. I howled until all the dogs in that room joined in chorus. I howled until the noise rolled from floor to ceiling, filled every inch, and after reaching every cavity it could reach, spilled onto the surrounding blocks. I howled until we achieved a frequency that trembled through every cell in my body; pulsed through my flesh like an artificial heartbeat. The hair of my arms stood on end. I howled until the vibrations pressed their way into the backs of my eyelids and the palms of my hands. I howled until all the stale air was gone from my lungs.

Sometimes I feel like my life is so ridiculous, there really isn't anything to do but laugh. 

And so I did. I laughed away all the anger. I laughed away the throbbing heat in my face and the ringing in my ears. I laughed away the knots in my stomach. I laughed until I cried and what a sight that would have been; one lonely girl amidst a pack of domesticated beasts, hysterically sobbing and laughing simultaneously with her face buried in their fur.

Maybe I am broken. Maybe the frenzies and the badges and the howling and the inappropriate laughter are activities reserved for broken girls. But there is something so hilarious, and so unlimited, about being me. Broken or not, I get by just fine on my own. 

A woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd; but a woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one's ever been before. 

The question fits the question mark

I dreamt of nothing. I lay on my back, my eyelids wide open and fixed on the ceiling, my stomach twisting, weaving itself into thick knots. Every night it's the same; the emotional stress presents itself as a real and tangible discomfort in the pit of my abdomen and at the bridge of my nose. When sleep finally comes and offers it's reprieve from the physical manifestation of my anxiety, it torments me instead with uneasy dreams of senescence, of ashen and inhospitable wastelands, of ruin. Worst of all are those dreams of pleasant memories that lure me into false comfort and make my heart sink that much deeper upon awakening. I found consciousness before the light of day and opened my eyes one at a time to blearily face a reality I have been trying my best to escape. I am greeted with yet another overcast day and the same thick knots in my gut.

I kicked off the blankets, regretting not wearing clothes to bed while my body shivered and nearly sent me back under the covers. Pressing myself to keep moving (always to keep moving), I got out of bed, threw whatever dirty clothes lay strewn about my room onto my body, and hurried into the kitchen.  My body physically rejected the thought of consuming solid food for the third day in a row, so I hastily poured juice down my throat, brushed my teeth, and left my house.

Under the pressure of the world's merciless and disparaging stare, the thin veil of composure I conceal myself with threatened to come undone. A loud and marked hunger bubbled underneath the surface, and it was all I could do not to scream and cry and accuse the world of it's cruelty and unfairness right there on the 99 B-Line. 

I spent the rest of the day with my face hidden behind my computer and my lips pressed firmly in an expressionless gaze. I did not trust my mouth to keep quiet my disquiet, and had I opened it, the whole class would have surely heard the roaring coming from my insides.

Trust me, I feel as pathetic as I am sure I seem.
But perhaps it was foolish of me to think we could speak freely so soon. I know this man not as a friend, but as a lover. We were nothing and then we were something and maybe now, in the absence of lines, I have no idea where to tread. 

This will run its course. I just have to let it somehow.

A thousand lies, you tell yourself; that no one ever loved you right

Dark Side of Me

I was running. At first my legs carried me fast and far; over pavement, through deserted, narrow streets, buildings passing by as indistinct but uninterrupted panels of gray, ready to bury me under their heaviness like the sides of a coffin. Something inside of me, some bloodthirsty savage began taking hold of my body and, threatening to paralyze me in retribution for my sins, grew like a shadow at sunset. I willed my legs to accelerate, to run faster towards a destination, any destination, where I could escape from the suffocating encumbrance of concrete and steel rising up around me; and the monster rising up inside me. 

I ran for quite some time before I realized it was snowing. Thick white flakes fell down around me, settling in my hair and climbing up around me as tall, exaggerated drifts. Like Atlas and his celestial sphere, I carried the city's desolation on my shoulders; an unassuming emptiness, however ripe with it's own unyielding density that bore down on me and sent my feet crashing through the crystalline ice. It reached the height of my hips and I could no longer run at the force I had been. Slowing down, the blur of metal, concrete, and glass became clear and well-defined. The buildings became giants observing me with intent and disapproving eyes. An overwhelming urgency spread throughout me; my heart beat faster in an unavailing attempt to provide my limbs with the blood needed to get me out from under their gaze. 

The snow disappeared and my legs gave way. My eyes left my body and I saw myself slow down, my ankles gradually melting into the asphalt. Now without feet, my knees buckled and I was sent hurtling into the earth ahead of me, all the while my body parts slowly becoming indiscernible from one another, liquifying, and yet still trying to make ground. My frame unfurled; reduced to a puddle, my toes found themselves laying nearly a kilometer away from my head. I felt more removed from myself than ever, a thin stretch of water; my skin, muscles, blood vessels, bone exposed for men and giants alike to catch glimpse of and assign value to.

I could do nothing but watch as my illegible spill of flesh lost all worth.

This wall won't hold forever.

Your time has come, it's now or never.