An end is near

And while I wait, I fear

For the plans I put in place;

What happens when I get to the end of this race?

“I wanna go back, go back, and do it all over, but I can’t go back I know.” –Eddie Money: I Wanna Go Back.

Time marches ever onward,

And I am a soldier marching

A funeral dirge, always with

My left foot forward first.

I can’t beat this steady rhythm

That carries me forward,

Like the ocean at my back

Pushing me out to sea—

A land-locked vessel tossed

Around the ocean like a feather

In a hurricane, shredded apart

By the hands of Mother Nature.

My name is not Virginia,

And I did not line my pockets with rocks,

But I did wade into this storm upon the ocean,

And I did intend to get lost among the waves.

Here, in the calm before the storm,

Time and space don’t matter,

Because neither will come to save me

When my ship sinks, and I drown.

It’s much easier flipping pages

Than it is turning whole chapters;

You’ve got to find where it begins,

And also mark where it ends.

Turn too fast or too far and

You wind up in the middle of a story,

In the middle of a sentence,

In the middle of a paragraph

Wondering why you leapt in the first place.

Time marches onward one second after another

In consecutive order like ants marching

To fill the queen’s order: “this is our quota,

Our fill of the food for the month.”

Time never leaps, except for that one time

Every four years when the calendar jumps,

And every four years I find myself wondering:

What am I supposed to write on that extra page?

This is the edited version of the poem I posted earlier. The following piece can be related, at least in a bug sense, to a poem I wrote in 2007 titled: June Bug.

Of all the bugs that bite

I’m bitten by a tick;

Infected with his disease.

I’ve caught a spring fever,

A viral infection,

Like I caught little white butterflies

When I was a child skipping through the clover.

The tick burrows his head in my cerebellum,

Releasing his poison as he sucks my blood;

Little vampire!

Now my thoughts turn, and transform

Like the changing of the seasons.

It would be impressive, if it wasn’t so invasive,

That this insignificant insect

Has violated the sanctity of my secrets.

There are teeth marks in the meat of my amygdala

Where his poison manipulates my emotions;

A child at the controls of a nuclear reactor.

Of all the bullets to lodge inside my brain

It was the bullet with your name scratched into it

That found a home inside my head.

And now my amygdala bleeds tainted thoughts,

Colored by the silver of the bullet I tried to end sanity with—

The irony: I created chaos with your bullet.

I was at peace before your name

Became a permanent resident inside the asylum of my thoughts.

I’ve been blogging here for six years. That’s a long damn time for me to do anything. And I had other Xanga sites long before this one. Some things have changed; other’s have always remained the same, and always will. One thing I’ve always been able to count upon in the last six years is my constantly shifting moods; like right now, my heart’s not in this. I’m writing simply for the sake of writing. None of what I’m putting into words actually means anything to me.

I’ve also always been able to depend upon my suicidal longing. It’s never failed me, or ever left me. I wish I could say the same of people, but I can’t. People have failed me numerous times. People have left me in droves, and not just here, but in real life. I know I’m largely to blame for just being me; I drive people away, I want to drive people away, because I can’t kill myself guiltlessly if I think there’s anyone left who might care or miss me. So every so often I have to try and purge myself of those closest to me.

That’s another thing I can always count on. I will always burn my bridges. I like watching them crack and crumble into the river rushing below. The sound those bridges make when they collapse, and splash into the water; it’s beautiful, it’s perfect. There’s no other sound I love better than the crackle of fire. It’s destruction in its finest form.

The things that have always changed are the people I associate with. A wise friend once told me, “friends come and go.” He was right, and at the time, he was among those that left. Now we’re only sham friends. We’re listed as friends on Facebook, but we rarely talk, and I prefer not communicating, just stalking from afar. I like to know what people are doing, how they’re doing, how they’re fairing without me in their life, but I don’t actually want to be a part of their life. That requires too much effort. That requires caring, and I just don’t have it in me to do that anymore.

I’m always being told I’m a nice person. I’m always being told I’m loved. That’s everyone’s immediate response when I say something truthful about myself which they perceived negatively. Perhaps Rebeka (@UnderlyingDiscontent) was right, perhaps I do enjoy the attention, at least a little bit. I shouldn’t blame me, but I do. There’s healthier ways of getting attention, but I don’t want them. I only want the attention associated with my pessimism. In junior high and high school I fought for my father’s attention by misbehaving. I spend a lot of time getting in trouble, just so he would yell at me. It was the only time we ever communicated.

I didn’t understand then that was because my mother had told him when I was a baby that he was never going to have anything to do with me, and from then on he really didn’t, unless my mother couldn’t deal with me, then she wanted him to be the bad guy; then she wanted him to lay down the law, because I’d listen to him. She always told me he never wanted a relationship with me. She always tried to pretend like she was helping me get closer to him, but really she was the wedge between us.

Even today we aren’t as close as we could be, as we should be, and we never will be, because I don’t want that, but we’re closer than I ever dreamed we would be. I love my father; that’s another thing that’s never changed. I have always loved my father, because I’ve always known and understood how much he sacrificed for his children. Seventeen years of his life married to my mother, seventeen years of his life down the drain, all for his children. No one has ever loved me that much, or ever could. And the craziest part? He has no reason to love me.

So what if I’m his daughter, that doesn’t make me inherently special. She’s my mother and I don’t love her for that reason. She’s my mother and I hate her, but I love him, and I don’t know why. No, that’s a lie. I know some of the reasons. One of them is because he gave up seventeen years of his life, years that he could have just disappeared from and done good things for himself but didn’t. He stayed when other men would have run. He stayed when anyone else in his situation would have given up.

I love him because I’ve always loved him, and I will always love him, and that is the reason I can’t kill myself. He is my reason these days. Every time I sit down behind the closed bathroom door, trusty steak knife in my hand pressed to my throat, I think of my father, the only one who’s ever truly loved me for reasons unknown, and I can’t do it. I owe him so much, and not just my life. He saved me without even trying. He saved me without doing anything but simply existing. He never tried to turn me against my mother. He waited for years for me to realize what she was doing because he knew if I didn’t come to that understanding on my own, it would never mean anything.

Besides, who wants to tell their child that their mother is using them? No one wants to tell their child that. No one wants to tell anyone that. I don’t know why I’m writing all this. I didn’t know where to go, or what to say, my heart wasn’t in it, but now it is. My heart’s bleeding through these words, saturating this goddamn page.

Lots of things have changed, and lots of things have remained the same. I can always count on my constants, but only one of them is a person. Everyone else fades in and out, but my father has always remained, even when I feel like we’re oceans apart. No, our relationship will never be perfect. It will never be what it could have been before my mother got a hold of me, but it’s better than it was, it’s better than what it would be we’re I still operating under my mother’s influence.

I’m sorry none of this applies to anyone but me. It is my blog. If you read this far you must be a saint or you’re just really bored and had nothing better to do. No one ever reads my rambling bullshit but me, and I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them for leaving me all the time either. I’d leave me too if I could. No, no I wouldn’t. I’m too grandly deluded for that. Despite all my self-loathing and self-hate, I still love myself because I want to believe I’m special in a fucked-up kinda way. I want to believe my self-hatred and self-loathing make me special. Does that make any sense to you?