chloetcommathecreator-blog

[chloetcommathecreator-blog]

Oh

Last year I went through an extremely traumatic experience. I was impregnated by someone I met online and ended up having an abortion on April fools day. It was completely unexpected because I had an implanted IUD birth control device at the time. Two months later I found out it was not installed properly because it fell out. Blood poured out everywhere and I bled through all my layers of clothing. It would not stop bleeding. When I went to Planned Parenthood a couple days later, the doctor put the IUD back in. She also found out I had contracted gonorrhea and chlamydia. It was an incredibly distressing experience and I suspect it was caused by those online encounters I had on OkCupid.

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He’s big – he is a mutt - half black and Jamaican other things, at a later party I will ask and he will tell me that he is eight inches. The rest of the night comes in flashes. I am making a lot of noise because it hurts so goddamn bad and I am too drunk and not aroused enough to be wet. I think we fall off the bed at some point and I remember that he laughs but I keep moaning or something. Then somehow we are back on the bed and he is going down on me, trying to get me wet, and I have my hands in his hair, thinking that I don’t like the feel of black people’s hair, thinking about washing my hands afterwards and the pungent smell of African-American hair. And then he is in me again and he tries to pick my legs up and put them on his shoulders for a better angle but it doesn’t fit.

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From abortion to contracting chlamydia and gonorrhea #STD

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My first time doing anal

The first time I had anal sex I was in Rome. I had spent the earlier part of the night at a Pub Crawl directly next to our hotel which Miles had gotten our group into for a reduced rate but him and I left at eleven because he wanted to get me in bed.

And when I sat on top of him, the pressure caused me to let out this horrific watery fart. Completely horrified I tried to voice my embarrassment and turned to run off but he bear hugged me to his chest and told me that he didn’t respect me any less. I made some sarcastic comment back and he told me to clean up in the bathroom, which I quickly and gratefully did. Then we threw all the sheets from the three small European beds into the closet because I had shit and/or bled all over them. And we tried to have sex again but his erection kept fluctuating.

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Look who this is

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Old men are so sexy

I want him in bed with me every night naked against the wall We get our own blankets but we wrap around each other when we wake up and I am tucked in the curve of his body, tight in his arms Half asleep in the middle of the night he asked me what was going on as I tossed and turned and tried to sleep and he kissed me softly on the mouth

I love that he fucks me on my period          that he is excited to fuck me He is an old man in a young man’s form but nothing can disguise the hints - the stretch marks silver like the glint of fish scales on his sides and the tiger stripes climbing up his back, the thinning hair atop his head, jet black and course, or the tired look he wears under his thick eyebrows.

I am with an old man - a grumpy old man - and I like him so much.

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OMG I CRASHED MY CAR AGAIN

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omg i crashed my car :(

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Freshly 21 and ready to kill myself

I was freshly 21 and was ready to kill myself. It had been a long journey but in my head it had been a miracle I hadnít done it sooner considering the circumstances. Three days after my 21st birthday and I was starting an internship at a resort as part of my culinary school curriculum.

I had just moved to Florida and I hated it. The people were shriveled and orange and the heat was disgusting. From the minute I stepped foot out of the airport, everything in my life was constantly covered in sand and sweat. I felt grainy and grimy at all times, living in a summer vacation condominium in a golf resort retirement community, where the showers left me feeling dirtier and the furniture always felt slightly damp. My roommate, Shelby, a new foodie, was too lazy to take her adorable dog down one flight of stairs and let him shit all over the deck and didnít pick it up.

I stayed in my room. I watched nine seasons of Futurama in almost a week. It wasnít a conversation that I had with myself. It was an idea or a hype that grew and grew until it was a decision embedded in my head. I was going to die somehow, soon because I was done and could not do it anymore.

There comes a time in depression where one completely ignores or loses sight of reason and becomes lost in the relief of the promise of The End. When I was young, I remember reading a book that described death as a Great Sleep as a young child and thinking, ìThat doesnít sound so badî.

I had spent most of my life sleeping. In my teenage years I would supplement my nearly-constant sleep (when outside of school or sportsÖ though I did sleep in classes) with Zzzquil, Alcohol, Rohitssuin, Marijuana, Tobacco and sometimes mixes of many to sleep as much as I could. This was not a completely conscious thing. I knew that I slept most of my day (14 hours sometimes a day) but the periods where I was awake felt like they lasted much too long always and I was exhausted, body and soul, at all times. I did not track how long I slept, only how long I had to stay awake.

I sometimes imagine that I could understand how people die of overdoses. Accidentally on purpose. You take a couple extra, a bit more than usual, you can handle it, youíve done this before, and if itís too much, too bad. For me it is apathy and depression collided.

For example I drank my fourth drink in a dark bar with friends and I think about how much Xanax I am prescribed and I think about how I took two that day because I knew I was going to be emotionally tested and I was anxious a bout itÖ I thought in a flat tone in my head, ìIf this kills me, thatís fineî, but my heart continued to beat on.

I was only in Florida for two weeks. I was supposed to have spent five months there for an externship that is halfway-point of the program at the Culinary Institute of America. Had I been there that entire period, I would have killed myself. I would have drowned in the ocean in my goggles and it would have broken my familyís hearts but I was already a useless burden and an embarrassment. It would look like a drowning, not a suicide. Maybe they would find a little too much booze on me. This was how I thought.

I spent a week decaying in the Florida humidity working in a place where time slowed down with the weight of misery. I spent my time thawing shit ìbreadî imported from France when squeezing muffin batter out of pre-made mixes. I spent more time opening boxes and unwrapping packing than ever interacting with food. During staff smoke-breaks, being a non-cigarette smoker, I sat quietly in the dank humidity and smoke of half a dozen other grim coworkers and waited waited waited for the day to be over.

Day one on the internship: I filled out paperwork in an air-conditioned trailer where the secretaries worked. They wore too much makeup and high heels in their small trailer of all females. I felt bad for them.

Handing in my new hire papers, I was told I needed to drive down the street for a drug test. Having celebrated my birthday by finishing the last of my weed three days prior, I know I would fail. No panic came though, just a resigned apathy.

On the ten minute driver over, I considered buying a kit from the pharmacy to help pass the test. I did not. I read a magazine in the waiting form full of Spanish men and peed into the cup over the blue toilet water and thanked the nurse for kindly doing her job.

A week in I got a call that I had failed the drug test where sitting in the ancient, leaky Lincoln Towncar I had been loaned in a Target parking lot. The women on the phone told me that my test results were two to three times the amount needed for the sample to register.

I thanked her and sat silently in the car for a few minutes before getting a call from Patsy, the elderly receptionist in the air-conditioned trailer. ìI donít know what your situation is but this is a drug-free workplace and you can no longer work here. I will also be contacting your school.î She told me. I didnít say much back and sat in silence in the moldy leather seat a while longer before telling my stepmom.

A three month suspension and an expensive last minute flight home to my fatherís house in Maryland and I spent the entire time in my dark room, fan whirring, under the covers, either sleeping or too exhausted and drained to move or even think about anything but the misery of it all, the crushing weight that held me down and constricted my chest. In the middle of the night when I couldnít go back to constant sleep, I sat outside in the snow and smoked bowl after bowl of greenery until I was calm enough to fall asleep or watch a show without the bad thoughts of seething self hatred and embarrassment and regret of my existence and the burden I was to my parents.

I did not speak at dinner on the nights they asked me to eat with them and I mustered up the courage. I felt on the verge of tears for months. A ëhow are you?í brought me to tears.

One day my parents and I sat in a narrow sunlit room filled with books and I cried on the couch, silently dripping tears onto my knees, not looking up as I told my father, the neurosurgeon, that I felt so useless that I could be lobotomized and still be the same.

On the ride home from the airport coming from Florida, my father told me, no questions asked, as I cried silently facing away from him, that this was not the first time I had ìfallen off the bikeî he said, and he and Moni and Kate and Jules were all going to help me get back on the bike. They did. $200 per session therapy, Xanax, more Prozac, Wellbutrin, Lexapro, one $800 month supply of Abilify later and I was slowing morphing back from zombie to human being. Sometimes my parents would bring me dinner or lunch in bed, and I would nibble at it before giving to Sasha or hiding it at the bottom of my trash can, as if they didnít know me better than I knew myself.

[chloetcommathecreator-blog]

Awful and powerless

11/26/2014 i feel awful as always as always as always as always crying about the news as black boys are gunned down and people riot but it has always been this way people hurt so much each day people are lynched and then people word-vomit all over facebook trying to seem compassionate or informed or talking for the sake of talking i’m so tired i hate everyone, including myself - currently sickeningly full from too much caramel, sweaty and unshowered in a dirty bed with nothing to do but blaze empty bowls and wait for the snow to stop and work to start. i hate the guy that i am seeing. hate the way he treats me and the feeling that the only reason he likes me is my looks and my body i feel powerless in my own world, i feel like i do the minimum amount of existing i feel like i am rotting as I walk i feel too useless and stupid to even write anything of any importance that only I will read

2.19.15

My phone helps me to: Regulate my sleep schedule Find my way around the world Track my period Log my moods Regulate my diet Exchange photos with friends whom I haven’t seen in years Get access to a ‘sixth sense’ - a world of information at our fingertips Not having a phone for two or three weeks has made me feel like a person with a learning disability in a normal classroom, meaning that phones are now such an assumed part of this generation and this era that even in places where cell phones are discouraged, like classrooms and libraries and during meals, without a phone, one can feel like they are missing a portal into a world that everyone else can peer into. In class, my chef asked me to pull out my phone and call my partner when he was annoyed that she was not back before her timer had gone off for the oven. She arrived seconds later, but looking around, I saw everyone else had pulled their phone out and was texting her. I told the chef that I did not currently have a phone and he stared at me before someone volunteered to do it. Even if I did have my phone, I did not have her number.

Meeting people places was a nightmare. Plans would change, as they always do, and I would end up circling a crowded lot looking for my friends who were probably already off campus but couldn’t communicate with me.

Having people text my roommate to find me.

Having to use my roommate’s phone to call people and not being able to tell them a number to call back on.

Sitting through an entire meal without looking at news, emails, my schedule, my grades, Instagram photos and other entertainment was painfully boring. People who are already difficult to talk to are even more difficult to get the attention of.

One thing I do see as a positive reason not to have a phone is that I see more of the world around me. With my phone I can access the entire world. Without a phone, the world becomes smaller. More beautiful, but infinitely slower and smaller. ---- I want to pass wines class so that I can prove to myself that I am capable of excelling in a subject of my choosing and continue to grow in knowledge without the crippling stress that having to retake the class and pay ~$4200 would be like for me and my parents.

-----

I want to be around someone who I think is smart and nice and enjoyable to be around. Preferably ADD, not republican, not closed-mindedly religious, friendly, extremely likeable, polite, accepting, taller than me, sexy, bilingual, loving, sweet

-----

2.20

I’ll live until everything I said I’d never do, I did.

I want to tattoo that onto my back in latin and then tell people that I forget what it means.

I wish it were appropriate to not wear a bra. Ever.

I hate getting dressed up. I look awful and boyish. My service pants are glue-hemmed at the bottom with stains from the dried glue looking like I waded through dirty snow. I feel like a planet. I am stuffed into this pair of pants that is so tight that I have to choose between having my pants unbuttoned and unzipped in public during service class like a pervert or fainting from the cutoff of blood flow from my waist down. I kept it unbuttoned during class but with my enormous sack of a blue service jacket - that nearly doubled as a dress - no one could see any shenanigans. My Buddha belly could hang free, unrestricted, same as if I were a trashy old alcoholic at a free outdoor music festival. But nope. Still unzipped in service class. Unzipped in the brain, unzipped in life.

I realize as I wrote the previous section that I can easily fix my problem by buying some new goddamn pants that fit and having them professionally tailored. I will need it other times in my life.

I desperately need to go shopping. I need a new wardrobe entirely.

2.22.15

Bold red, almost black in color. Heavy in tannins, oak-barrel aged, subtly sweet, highly acidic but with lingering complexity. Hints of caramel, mirabelle, grapefruit. Medium length. Made from difficult to initially cultivate but increasingly resilient grapes found in both Old World wine regions such as Alsace, France, as well as warmer climates in North America, specifically the Central California coast region.

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Teenage trauma

6/4 “Chloé, do you have an answer? Oh, that’s right. You don’t talk” He said.

Twenty one years old and eight years later the words still wrench at my gut.

At thirteen, the words of a teacher can define one’s world And they did.

Thirteen and the world was split between two types of people; Those who talk and those who live quietly locked away in their minds… Split between social butterflies and the quiet loners, like lepers. And I felt the loneliness envelop me, cover up my character and warp my identity.

Thirteen and I let the words spill out in loopy cursive onto a gold-embossed red notebook my grandmother, my Ba, had given me. Rage and pain laid out on paper and tucked within a pillowcase next to me, Present like a poltergeist as I tried to sleep. Thirteen and my father read my diary and I found myself in a room with him and my therapist, trying to smooth the razor edges of my thoughts that had so scared him to read.

Here, at twenty-one, I crank out words onto google docs, clacking away at the keyboard until the pensieve is full and I feel contentedly empty and free from the storm within that not even my klonopin can quell as I try desperately to fall asleep at night.

I talk. I talk. But maybe not the way you do.   If only others knew of the deluge of thoughts that pour from me and burst from my keyboard. If only I were brave enough to share.

Everything you could ever know about me is tucked away in a file absentmindedly labelled ‘42’. Every heartbreak and rage and ecstasy - Every day - Is hidden away in seemingly unending pages of words Such that I am free and clear-minded. My entire world is spelled out on a webpage. Twenty six letters explain the experiences behind the eyes Of twenty one years on this Earth In this body.

You can find anything on the internet, they say. Let me tell you In some remote corner of the vast world wide web You can even find my soul.

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God

 I don't believe in God as a palpable, cohesive, man-esque being But I know an angel An angel that softly descended into my life and pulled me from the abyss An angel with blonde hair and blue eyes who I can touch, hug, talk to.

An angel lives in my house It is wrapped safe in her wings

An angel that became a mother figure to two desperately lost and shattered children And who said that from the moment she met us, we were her kids.

5/5/14

My period is two weeks late. I’m afraid I might be pregnant but am trying not to think about it. If I don’t get my period within the week I will take a pregnancy test and see. I don’t feel stupid though and I don’t regret the sex I had with Dan. He bought condoms that were too big and caused so much friction that it made my vagina mad sore and he said there was too much friction on his end as well. Since the first time I let him in me without a condom it has been hard to go back to using them. I need to buy some that fit his dick, just to be safe and save me the stress, but it feels so good when he fucks me bare and he first enters me slowly, us pushing against each other until he is all the way in me… so so slow… and it makes me almost come it feels so good. Once he came immediately after entering me like that - just once, slow. Strangely, it feels better than when I am ‘stupid wet’ as he calls it, and we slip and slide against each other until his stomach below the navel is shiny wet and my hands are on his hips and sometimes there is a wet spot under us on the bed where I squirted something?? out of my body during sex without realizing or noticing. I like the way it feels when he comes on me, pulls out and grips the head of his penis and squirts warm semen on me like the type of hot rain in summer that almost hisses when it hits the sweltering pavement. I like the way it feels with the lights off, in complete black, when he pulls out of me, telling me he is going to come, and I feel the warm squirts on and up my back or the back of my legs. I think I like it for the warmth of it. I’ll smear it across my body to wipe it off and wipe my hands off on the bed before I lay there, content not to move. I thought about Ari today and having sex with him but it seems like a movie I saw, not my life, and then I thought about Dan on top of me, in me, when he told me he wanted to make me cum in a moan and I almost pee myself thinking about it. The memory sets the lower half of my body on fire. I like the way his dick feels and he doesn’t taste bad or like anything, just warm skin. I don’t mind the thick hairiness of him or pulling a pubic hair from my mouth as I clean up in the bathroom. It doesn’t repulse me. I like him even though we don’t look each other in the eyes often or talk about anything too deep. I like him even though his voice is monotone and his jokes are bad and he buys all his clothes at thrift shops that often don’t fit and has been wearing the same clothes since high school, taken from his father. I don’t mind that he doesn’t have anywhere near a flat stomach or that his back is tiger-striped with stretch marks. I don’t mind that his breasts are about the size as mine and his butt would be described as limp. I don’t mind when he farts dryly in his sleep and am so grateful he doesn’t snore. I like the way the first thing he does when he wakes up is wrap his arms around me and press into me. I don’t like when he puts my hand down the covers onto his dick. He has only done it once. I don’t like looking him in the eye during sex, or anywhere near his face. I don’t like how thick his eyebrows are to the point that he constantly looks bemused and bored. I don’t like that everyone and their brother is named Dan but I like Dan and want him back in Hyde Park so he can slip into bed with me and we can nap together tangled in the sun.

5/18/14

I take 42 pills a week, six a day. I am controlled and controlling I am everything that society wants me to be.

I am tweaked of imperfections Bleeding on schedule Able to fall asleep within thirty minutes Calm Sociable Functioning.

I put hot pink allergy pills in each section of my week-long pillbox.

I enjoy refilling it enjoy the sound of pills rattling in a plastic bottle

I enjoy the different colors and shapes I like that I am able to identify each med by sight

My jaw hasn’t been clenched for a while.

I have nightmares like never before and wake up drenched in sweat. But I can fall asleep without crying. Maybe I’m just sick from rapid temperature changes at work… working in a blistering hot kitchen and then doing inventory in the freezer until my fingers and lips are numb.

I am everything my parents want me to be and less. I am compassionate, empathetic, pretty, artistic, yearning to please

I bite my nails until they bleed and throb stingingly with every beat of my pulse.

I can create new worlds and disappear into them in books and movies and moments and dreams

I listen to audiobooks about things like the life of George Washington

I get along with my borderline mother

I can cook for myself and live alone

I am good in bed

I drink too much

I ache I ache

My foot hurts from when I broke it when I was thirteen, falling when climbing out of my second story bedroom window to see a boy I have never met.

When klonopin makes me too tired, I can chug caffeine and liven up.

I succumb to naps like a cat passing through a patch of sunlight through a window I am sucked into a sleep in which I turn off my alarm without waking and continue on and on I do not have nightmares in my naps.

I am medicated I am tweaked To make me a better me. To make me a different me? To make me a different, better me. One who is content to exist and watch what happens

But mostly just is planning the next meal Trying to adapt to change as it revs and eludes my grasp no matter how fast I run or how quickly and adeptly my mind races.

My favorite pill is the abilify because of the blue color that stands out against the whites and beiges. I like the contrast between that and the pink allergy pill dropped next to it.

The chemicals are rerouted by me the chemicals are controlled. I steer myself without the distraction of me

But I still want to get high, I think. Just a little bit of a body high to be able to lay there in my mind. But maybe I’d rather just nap instead of wasting my time stoned.

Chloé 2.0 No metal plates or screws or nitrous Just manipulated neurotransmitters at my core

Here I am 21 years in the making Slightly overweight Still antisocial Oversleeping Inactive Unhealthy Dabbled with acne Imperfect teeth Short Awkward in my own mind Avoidant of phone calls

But my jaw isn’t clenched anymore And that was all that I asked for then.

She lived among giants. She was the shyest and most calm Jack Russell I have ever met. We chose her or maybe I chose her because she was the runt of the litter, cowering in the corner and absolutely petrified of everything when we met her. Her main happiness in life was food. Once my grandfather tried to feed her nonstop to see if she ever got full - she didn't. She was a black spot running through the snow and a black and white ball curled up at my belly in bed at night. She would jump into our laps and rest her arms and head on our shoulders like she was giving a hug.

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Nightmares in Hawaii

4/12/14

I had two nightmares in the loft in Hawaii. Both had to do with my mother. In the first, Allie and I were at her house and she acted normally and fake-kind until suddenly she snapped and was threatening me with a large hammer. Glass shattered and Julien was there too but there was a knock on the door and the police and my dad and step-mom entered to save us. My mother dropped on the floor and started crying hysterically, playing the victim, and I looked down at her and asked, “Are you serious?” Before I left. I felt relief knowing that I would not have to see her again.

I woke up and felt guilty.

In the second dream, my brother and I were at our grandparent’s house in France and my grandmother was taking my brother to his externship except I kept telling her that she was confusing the location for a place in a different country. I was in my bedroom that I always take when I stay there, and my grandmother brought the phone to me. My mother was on the other end and had only called to ask how much me and my brother weighed. I responded with a line something along, “Are you fucking kidding me?”. I don’t remember, but I definitely said ‘fuck’ and was enraged in the dream.

What I typed into the notes in my phone while waiting for my flight home at the airport in Hawai’i;

I am at the LIH airport in Kauai. I was woken at 6am to clear out the timeshare apartment and get breakfast. Their flight was at 10am. My flight is at 10pm. I went to the airport with them, then realizing that my flight was three hours later than I had thought--I don't read very carefully. Classic me mistake-- so I took a cab to Queens bath because I hadn't gotten to see it and wanted to swim in it. The cab ride one way was $100. It was too cold to swim. I wandered over the lava rocks until 4:30, when the cab picked me up. My luggage was hidden under the thick, dead leaves of a tree whilst I was on the rocks. I tried to read a Terry Pratchett book but couldn't get into it. It rained on and off and the wind was rough and I was so cold. And bored. I was also stressed out that the cab driver might not pick me up again and that I would miss my flight and my phone was about to die and I was trying not to think about the $200 I just blew on cab fare. Horseshit. I got to the airport at 5ish and had to wait until 7 in the open air airport until check in opened and I could get my boarding pass and get to my gate. I'm sitting in the far corner at gate 3 with my red flannel shirt drapes over my legs to keep me somewhat warm. My face is burnt from not wearing sunscreen today, thinking it would be fine because it was so overcast. I look like hell. I feel ugly. I feel ugly and so tired and lonely lonely lonely in a tiny airport by myself on an island so far from... Home. I should feel lucky I was able to go on such an amazing trip and be with my family and do some of my favorite things like snorkeling and seeing beautiful sea life. But I still cried every night into my pillow quietly so that Justine and Dexter in the bed next to mine on the loft wouldn't hear me. I don't feel like a part of my family and I don't know why because they're so good to me. I sat on the cliffs at Queens Bath today and watched the ocean bash into the rocks with a terrifying force and wished I could just jump down, crush my skull on the rocks below, and have my body smashed and torn to small bits on the rough black rocks... Disintegrate into the sea. Vacation is like life There is no difference. Distractions keep you happy.... Or just distracted. But you are still alone. I am still alone and miserable and struggling to wake up to go to the BEACH and having nightmares every night, once I'm able to fall asleep. I looked at myself in the airport bathroom and I feel ugly and alone and stressed. As usual, I have a headache. Even when I don't use technology every day, the headache persists. So there's another reason for it. My nails are bitten so far that it hurts. I peeled the skin off of the bottom of my right foot where a small callous had formed and picked at my toe nails until I had ripped a sliver off of each toe. I don't want to be here But I don't want to go home.

I want to curl into a ball of fur and roll away away warm warm warm.

I don't want to be here I don't want to be me

I am still in paradise and I still feel like shit. All of the time. I still want to die and It's so hard to hide my crying in public when the waves of misery hit.

I don't want to be anywhere I don't want to have any responsibility Nothing I can't think of anything that I want

Except to be warm Right now.

It doesn't get better for me I am getting so close to done that I can't and won't deal with anything. I wish I could disappear. I even wish I could marry some random rich fucker just so I could be left alone. I want to be yards under the glittering waves forever, floating through a silent blue life.

I want to rip my eyes out and get rid of the headache behind them I want to google how many hydrocodones it would take for my body to shut down. I want to see if my parents have that many.

I want to melt into this uncomfortable black seat that I've been sitting in for two hours and disappear into nothing. No one at this gate would notice a thing.

I want to dye my hair white and shave my head and feel beautiful.

I need a haircut.

I want to lay in my bed and watch Always Sunny in Philadelphia until my brain turns off.

I want to die. Mahalo.

My therapist asked my what getting better looked like to me. I have no idea. In some ways I don’t want to get better or maybe I can’t even fathom what better looks like. I believe that I am stuck in this body and mind and it will never get ‘better’. It may change, but there will always be the headache and the tears at those quiet times when I am crushed by an unfathomable loneliness. What is my worth?

I think about dying every single day.

I baked eclairs the other day and got an externship.

Am I better?

If I smile and laugh with friends and dress myself and go outside, my parents will think I’m better. That I have finally reached OK normal functioning girl in her twenties living out the best years of her life.

I need to move out so that I can deal with myself alone, without my parents there every day. I don’t want their help with this. I don’t want my life to be their life still.

I told my psychiatrist that on a scale of one to ten, I am at a three. Zero is when I truly truly want to be dead but won’t kill myself. Instead I’m immobile in bed, unshowered and in the same clothes for days at a time and take all the medicine available to sleep all of the time. Zero is when I am too depressed to cry. Or eat. Or maybe eat too much. One is when I am still unshowered and wearing the same clothes, but will get out of bed at least during the day. At One, I shift my sleep schedule so that I don’t have to interact with anyone, versus simply sleeping all the time. At One I am busy at night. One is where I feel a constant weight of dread in my stomach the entire time I am awake. I am still dependent on sleep medicine. Two is showering more than once every three days and changing my clothes. Even if I change from a white shirt and black leggings to another white shirt and black leggings. At two I will talk to people and not feel miserable in the presence of others. Two is making lists of things that I continuously put off. Three is where I function. I get dressed when I need to and am able to -- or care enough -- to make hair appointments or ask a friend in the area to hang out. Three is not following through with the friend and dreading their text message. Three is wondering what the point of going outside is. Nothing will happen. Nothing that matters will happen. Three is the frustration of having nothing to do, not being interesting in watching or reading anything. Bored. Four? Four is when I am distracted and busy with classwork that I like and have plans on the weekends to drink with friends. Four is holidays when I can dress up or when I am with a group of people with whom I am comfortable with. Four is not cancelling all my social plans because I can’t get out of bed or leave my room. Four is forgetting all the bad in my head and being the happy, bubbly, loud, crazy person that my friends know me to be. Four is having dinner conversations with my parents that matter and feeling like, for once, they are listening and able to understand me. Five is taking naps with Dan, where he is wrapped around me or softly stroking my arm or back and my eyes are closed and eventually we fall asleep and it is the middle of the day and the sun is still shining through the blinds. Five is being underwater so that all sounds of life are muffled to only a murmur and I float on the surface, calmly breathing through a tube and living in the world in water. Five is finally eating that food that I have been craving for. Six is being able to acknowledge my accomplishments. Six is the feeling after sex with Ari when he has come but is still in me and we just lay there and kiss. Six is going on a tough hike over difficult terrain and reaching the top of the mountain and looking across the landscape. Six is when Dan kisses me on the neck. Six is being so high that I am absolutely in tune with my body and sit on the floor in silence and do yoga -- stretching out each individual muscle and marveling at the movement of my body. Six is lying on the couch, high as fuck, and daydreaming. Six is being lost in a great book, unable to put it down. Six is admiring what I have built with my own hands. Six is driving in the car alone with the windows down on the highway and singing at the top of my lungs to a good song. Six is crawling into my bed, exhausted, and immediately falling asleep. Six is taking a nap in the sunlight. Seven is???

4/19

Tom and Aunt Steph & crew are here for Easter, staying over while they look for colleges with Hannah. She looks beautiful. A lot changes in two years, she seems ten years older.

I’m sleeping in the basement so I can do my own thing and be alone. Yesterday I got back from visiting Dan in Beantown… If every day felt like today, I would never leave him. I got into my bed after a dragging seven or eight hour drive and the loneliness was like a phantom limb. I wanted his arms around me in the dark, under the sheets. I wanted to share my bed and have him wrap around me first thing when he wakes up. I want to have sex with him so badly. But the frustration I had before I saw him was much worse and different. Before, I wanted to get off with someone so badly that the want and the can’t manifested itself in stirring anger in me. I want to stop watching porn though. I want to get off in my own world.

I don’t know how long Dan and I have been sleeping together but it has been a few months. At least six? Maybe it started in August? I don’t remember. But that seems to be the amount of time it takes to become comfortable sexually with one another. I would still say we are at the midpoint communication-wise, but other than that, we generally have figured each other’s bodies out.

I think that it is true that you can fall in love with anyone if you get to know their true self and accept that. Or even just glimpses into their life and why they are the way that they are. I would say that I am now over Ari and obsessed with Dan. Obsessed is a strong word, but sometimes that’s how it feels as I look through pictures of him… Pull up the picture I took of his feet with holes in his socks exposing his whole heel.

His parents brought up his fat period in high school the night we had dinner together. Was that a test? I don’t care honestly. Dan still isn’t fit. He has a small belly and every part of him I can wrap my arms around is soft. He wears the same clothes for years and buys most of his wardrobe at the thrift store and most of his clothes are really too small, which makes me crazy. He doesn’t go out of his way to spend money on things. I don’t get to complain, though, because I don’t want him to spend money on me. I want us to be on an even keel. What is that quote by the french woman banging Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction? ‘What is pleasing to the eyes is not the same as what is pleasing to the touch’ or something like that. Dan’s body is pleasing to the touch. I like the soft smoothness of his back and the hairiness of his arms. Soft soft everywhere like I could sink into him. I like the feel of his beard and the feel of his stubble.

I think you can fall in love with anyone. It is so hard to go back to being so alone.

But I don’t want to be his girlfriend. I don’t want to stress about the silences and the palpable pressure of the things we don’t say- and the things we know the other won’t say.

We are similar. Quiet thinkers, depressed stoners. I want someone who will drag me onto my feet and out of the house. I want someone who will feel comfortable talking and talking and just starting conversation. Someone who naturally wants to have conversations.

I don’t want to change Dan but I know that we will find people opposite to us that are a better fit.

I will not be Dan’s girlfriend because I don’t trust him because I don’t know what he is thinking. I will not be Dan’s girlfriend because of the time David called him and asked him to be his girlfriend and sent dirty texts and Dan went along with it. Left the room to take one of David’s calls. I will not be Dan’s girlfriend because I feel like he would be open to sleeping with guys while with me. I feel like he would be like one of Isaac’s straight boys who he drinks with and has sex with but who has a girlfriend and the girl never finds out. I can’t handle that… I will not be Dan’s girlfriend because kissing him involves too much thinking and I can’t overlook his ‘flaws’. Not flaws, but who he is that doesn’t align with what I am innately attracted and drawn to. I kind of hate the nasally sound of his voice. But I love the way he looks when he smiles real wide and looks away. He has a deflated-looking ass. I don’t think it’s cute when he sings in a weird voice. Sometimes I feel like we haven’t known each other long enough to already have so much silence between us. Or that’s just the way we are together naturally and it would be fine if I didn’t mind the silence but I do, even though half the blame is mine. I wish his dick was just a bit bigger, which totally isn’t fair of me. But I wish. And I wish that he would grab my breasts more aggressively and put his whole tongue in my mouth. I like having sex with him a lot, though. The best part of sex for me is when he first slides into me and I’m not so wet that there isn’t any friction. Skin on skin and it feels warm everywhere. I like having sex with him in the pitch dark and sucking his dick without being able to see anything. Just feel. I like the way it feels when he comes on me and it is warm and slick. I love that he will have sex with me when I’m on my period and that he cares whether or not I enjoy it. I don’t like that he doesn’t buy condoms that fit. I don’t like myself for letting him not use a condom, but when he is slightly in me and I just want to pull him closer, my sense of reason goes to shit.  I like that he accepts me for who I am and seems to understand my depression. Mostly. As if anyone could completely understand. But he knows somewhat. I like his arms around me and napping next to him, warped together while the sun is still up. I like him. BUT

I feel lonely and alone and unloved, ugly in so many ways. I feel awkward and anxious and tired and restless and miserable unclean immature greasy dirty full unfriendly untalented and shitty. I always feel shitty. I feel shitty when Dan tells me he is happy that I came eight hours to stay with him in his parents house. I feel shitty when I wear my glasses or when my hair is down. Or up. I feel like my front teeth are starting to jut out and are too big. I feel like my pores are gaping and noticeable as well as the acne scars on my nose that won’t go away. I feel like I don’t have enough money. I feel rude and introverted in the worst way and deeply miserable. I don’t know how to fix that. The moments I like best are only best in hindsight. My nails look yellow. I have a little more pubic hair than I want. I want to take pictures. but I don’t want to spend my life only seeing the world through a lens. I want to tear down the sky and repaint it so that the colors can entertain me on long drives alone. I want to be able to go as fast as I want on the highway. I want to be able to kill myself. I want to care about things and people. I want a lobotomy. And liposuction. And laser hair removal on my armpits and legs and upper lip and pubic area. I want to dye my hair white. I don’t want my roots to show. I want my teeth professionally cleaned every week. I want to be able to drink like I used to. I want access to harder drugs. I want my own apartment and my own dog and plants and garden. I want to cry most of the time. Most of the time, I want to be alone. I want to go to Vegas and win millions of dollars and never go back. I want to be in a relationship and not feel that sick feeling of dread that there is nothing between the two of you and you are trapped in a mistake. I want to have things to do and live in a place with warm weather but where people aren’t crazy cunts. I want to live in a place where people don’t honk incessantly at each other and have just a shred of respect and patience for other people on the road. I want to do so many things but I don’t want to do anything and I don’t want to get up. I want to travel through time and see the Earth half a million years from now. I want to live alone in the wilderness. I want my sister to get rid of eighty percent of the things she owns. I want my parents to stop buying unnecessary shit. I want to buy unnecessary shit. I want my bangs to look nice in the morning and not always be uncomfortable trying to make my hair look fine.

4/21

I live between worlds. The world on a suburban neighborhood within a maze of similar-looking streets The house my mother bought because it was within walking distance of Wooton High School. The house that never felt like home Where there is no escape except out the front door, running And the garden is beautiful and multitudes of birds surround the feeder And a young orange tree with cherry-sized fruits sits in the sunlight of the kitchen. The world where I look at where I come from and feel sick. Skinny, healthy, surgically enhanced people spewing venom and trying to tame raging storms. Where Maggie is a bad dog because she watches the birds and barks too much Where any flaw is a weakness to be picked apart and spread out on the sparkling granite islands while the TV plays a romantic comedy on mute. But don’t take it personally. That one crooked tooth and the glint in her eyes when she casually drops stinging insults The jokes she makes that are so thinly veiled they make me wince The constant commentary throughout television shows and commercials That make you wonder if anything is good in this world.

I went to Easter dinner at my mother’s house While my brother stayed at my father’s house, having told her that he was too busy to go. I resent him for it. I resented him when I came back home and he was still on the couch watching ice hockey While I had to suffer each crashing wave alone while trying to keep my feet on the ground.

I live in the world between worlds when there is no one around but me and the misery drains all the energy and positivity out of me Where I am stuck spinning like a top through the murky haze in my mind, Watching flickering screens until my body aches and my head throbs and I can finally fall asleep

I live in the world on Mass Ave where the cars peel by, horns blaring The attic and basement are filled with enough toys to entertain several schools of children For one little girl And we stay in our corners, in our own little unmolested worlds Unless it is dinner time and we all emerge.

I watched Wolf of Wall Street tonight. I watched as the wife said ‘No’ ‘no’ no and the husband fucked her anyway

I feel sick and tired and alone. It is six thirty AM now and I should sleep but I don’t care. I peeled off the nail of my right pinky toe last night as we sat on the couch on our phones as the ice hockey game played on the enormous television. I didn’t realize how much had peeled off until I clipped the rough edges later..

My meringue pies didn’t set. They ran like soup. I feel useless and stupid and pathetic and embarassed. I feel wasted

I took two naps in the basement after all the eggs had been found and the kids were outside. One nap before lunch and one thirty minute nap before I drove to my mother’s.

I hate my hair I look so ugly and strange without make up

I am still tired. I am always tired.

I feel like a dumb, quiet female around others. I watch as girls sit silent in groups of people and the boys drink their beer and tell stories about their adventures. I want to cry and eat everything I crave until it hurts and I don’t crave it anymore. I want to tell someone how badly I feel and have them understand. I don’t want them to understand, though, because I don’t want them to feel that badly.

I want to fall into a hole in the earth and sink into the silt and shit and fossils I don’t want to go back to New York I don’t want to stage or live in that apartment or be in that town or always be so alone and alone and alone I want to sleep and stay in my mixed up dreams

I want to lock myself in a tall tower with no doors and shave off all of my hair I want to quit taking up space and writing such stupid shit all of the time and one day later I still need to get my shit out of the dryer

4/23 An Honest Obituary

Chloe was born January 2nd, 1993 in Portland, Oregon. She was an older sister to Julien and Katie Nguyen. She was a daughter to Tung, Monika, Dominique, and Chris. Chloe was talented, artistic, thoughtful, empathetic. With her friends she was lively, engaging and full of laughter. She was also quiet, nihilistic, perpetually exhausted, insecure, guarded, awkward, antisocial and dealing with major depression, which eventually drained her of any excitement or will to live. She was selfish. She was twenty-one. She made beautiful things and was capable of creating much more, but she was an artist, not an engineer, and never made anything useful. She put forth no effort and made it through three semesters of college and experimented with culinary school. She was described as ‘exotic’. When she laughed, you could see the uneven dimples on her cheeks. She lived in her dreamworld. Death can’t be too different from sleep. If there is a heaven, she won’t be there. Maybe she wouldn’t want to be. In a universe where there is reincarnation, she would come back as a sloth, mole… sea turtle. Maybe even a bird. Life is short. Hers was shorter than most. But it goes on.

I spent the night watching movies and crying. I looked over the packet my therapist gave me and then took an online depression test. It seems like my main problem is worrying about the judgement of others and my daily stress level is above a 5 almost always if I have to leave the house, even for a walk with the dog or getting food through a drive thru.

Get associate’s degree Move somewhere warm Night classes for photography Plant a garden Live in Vegas for a while

4/25/13

A day in the life:

The day after I drove down to see Dan, a Monday, I spent the day alone because he wasn’t able to get work off. I went to the BC library to try and do a transcription on one of their computers because I had forgotten my laptop charger in my room at home and doubted the battery would last the five or more hours it would take to transcribe something. It took me over a dozen u-turns and ventures down random side streets to find the parking garage and I had to wait at the top level, while the rain let up, until someone left and I could take their spot. I checked the campus map to find the library; roundabout, stairs, stairs. It seemed obvious that I did not go here. Girls in their timberlands. I missed that. I sat at a four person computer station in the library diagonal to some girl. I tried to plug my phone in to charge it but there were no outlets on the computer so I plugged it into the socket on the floor. As soon as I did, the girl across from me told me that I had shut off her computer. I hadn’t turned off the extended outlet or unplugged anything so I was confused and felt bad. I asked her if she had lost any work and she said, “Not really”, in a drawn out, frustrated way that you talk to kids when they’ve done something wrong. I apologized and tried to log on to my computer but it required a BC username and passcode, which I did not have. Three minutes after sitting down and wreaking havoc, I left, apologized again to the girl, and asked the front desk where the guest computers were. I had to wait for one to open up and sat at a long table for two minutes as two BC girls eyed me. I don’t belong I don’t belong. I felt stupid pulling out my soundproof headphones and putting them on and the keyboard was incredibly loud. If I were to do a transcription, it would drive everyone in this quiet library crazy. I instead tried to take an online qualification test but the server would not take me to the site. The site was new, or being updated, and still had some issues, I think. Not having gotten much done but having passed an hour or two, I decided to leave. I wouldn’t have to pay as much for parking either. I went back the way I thought that I had come but nothing seemed familiar. It started to rain and I was wearing an already somewhat seethrough white shirt so I stopped under an awning and pulled another shirt over it. Luckily, everything I had brought was in my backpack. As usual, I packed terribly for the weather, having left MD when it was 84 degrees out and expecting the same in Boston. But the temperature in Beantown was half that. I ended up at a parking garage that seemed taller than I remembered. The parking machine wouldn’t accept my ticket. I put my iced coffee on top of the ticket machine and forgot it there and took the elevator up to the fifth floor, but here the fifth floor was not the top. Finally at this point I figured out that I was at the wrong parking garage and took the elevator back down, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone I had just been in the elevator with. I got so lost that I ended up walking on the outskirts of campus, past a graveyard, under a steady light rain. It probably took me forty minutes to get to my car. Truly, I amaze myself. My gladiators were soaked and uncomfortably slippery against my feet and I was so happy to get back to my car. I paid the nine dollar parking fee and then found as I exited that the machine wouldn’t accept tickets and would lift if you pressed the button for help. At this point I was hungry, so I crept through traffic in a heavy construction area to get to Five Guys. I put enough in the meter for two minutes and went in to order. In the bathroom, I saw that my eye makeup had run and there were black smudges under my eyes. I looked a little crazy. I got my food, at some fries while I sat in the warmth, then went out to my car to find a $25 parking ticket because the meter had run out. Amazing. I went to the Newton Library and stayed there until it closed at 9 and Dan was out of work. I did a seven dollar transcription in several hours and then tried to read Fire in the Lake but it is like reading a two hundred page essay and I had to continuously reread after my mind wandered.

I’m annoyed because I haven’t gotten my period yet and I always get stressed that I am pregnant when it’s late, even if I haven’t been having sex.

I took Sasha for a walk today and she pulled me to Little Falls Parkway, where I puked twice because I had just eaten two burger patties and drank too much water. It hurt. I probably threw up my pills too. I let Sasha off of the leash twice and both times she was very difficult to get back on the leash. But I didn’t want to deal with her dragging me through the woods and around trees at a sprint. I brought a cheese stick with me but she wasn’t at all interested- she was too busy harassing the wildlife. It was a short walk but felt much too long. As per usual, I got lost on the way home and guessed my way up steep streets until I ended up at the church across from my house.

Tomorrow I drive down to NY and Sunday I have a stage at Dani’s restaurant. I’m so done.

[chloetcommathecreator-blog]

I wake up at 3PM every day

3/13/14

I wake up at 3PM every day. The alarm on my phone goes off at ten and eleven and I shut it off in a dream-state. What is there to wake up for at that time anyway?

I wish I had more klonopin so my jaw would unclench. My teeth seem wired shut when my mouth is closed. I have to consciously breathe and focus on it to relax, but once the focus is gone, my teeth are clenched again.

I am going out to dinner with Allie tonight and probably Bret. We - or at least Allie and I - are probably just going to get as drunk as possible. She gave three options and all were walking distance. Latin, here we go.

Sasha is barking downstairs. I don’t think I will walk her today. Yesterday, she went up every driveway and chased every moving creature in people’s yards and it drove me crazy. The leash we have does not lock, so I need to keep my thumb on the plastic button and after crossing several streets and steering her around cars, my hand was almost numb from aching. She is a good dog though. She loves me so much. She’s beautiful.

Dan told me through text the other day that he is going to therapy. He has been upset at his externship at Lumiere and spends his time trying not to cry. I’m not sure how I feel about him telling me these things. Sharing. Am I the only one he can talk to, or wants to talk to about it? Sometimes I feel that if Dan wasn’t in my life, I wouldn’t really be upset about it. I probably wouldn’t see him much when I got back to the Culinary because my suspension puts me in a different class, and I’d be living off campus. I can’t imagine going back. I don’t like to think about it.

I do miss Dan sometimes though. I miss the time we spent at school where we would nap together every day. To me, that was everything I needed.

He is a soft kisser. Like Billy. I like hard, wet, rough kisses where you’re not thinking about anything but your lips and his and you couldn’t think of anything else if you tried. Kissing Dan, I sit there thinking, pressed against him. He doesn’t make me come. A few times he has moaned at me that he wants to make me cum as he fucks me. I hope I didn’t laugh externally but I did in my head. I’m maybe mean. He asked me to be more vocal in bed. I told him I would work on it.

Marla once told me she liked me more when I was drunk. That upset me and made me really sad. I think I’m the same way with sex, though. Sober, I am awkward and self-conscious but drunk or high I am giddy and excited.

I’ve never come during sex. I’ve gotten the sheets soaking wet, leaving puddles under us after sex, and my thighs get slick as I get aroused and everything is wet wet wet. But I’ve never come during sex.

The next guy I sleep with, I want to have tattoos and a big dick. I remember the feeling when Billy and I were having sex on the floor of my brother’s room and his dick was long enough that it stimulated this new place and if he had lasted longer (he lasted a good amount of time, no complaints), or if I had relaxed a bit more, I would have come. It was the closest I’ve every gotten and Billy was the guy I liked least out of everyone I’ve slept with. As Firas told me when he tried to figure out why I chose to sleep with Billy, “He’s a simple guy”. And he was. Really not much going on in his head, from what I could tell, and from what came out of his mouth. But I found him attractive and he was so tall and had a large dick and we had good sexual chemistry-- or maybe just teenage desire-- so I slept with him a few times during the summer after freshman year at Tulane. I usually tried to get him a bit high or drunk before we had sex because I was awkward and he would talk and I really did not give a shit about anything he had to say. He did not like me to see him naked and walking about. I didn’t like that.

Is sober sex part of adulthood? If so, I don’t want it.

Even if my memory is choppy, on New Years, after Mariel, Dan, and I tried to smoke all my weed (my idea-- I decided to stop smoking everyday and this was my last hurrah. I would be drug tested four days later and didn’t think about this. Idiot). But Mariel went home and Dan and I settled into the couch and got undressed again. I was barely dressed after the bath we had taken before Mariel came over. Dan was on top of me and kissing me hard and I liked it and gripped him hard. He told me he liked it when I pulled him towards me or something like that. I told him to bring condoms but I am a dumbass and we didn’t use them. As usual I was wet as fuck, and bringing my hand back up from between my legs, grabbed Dan’s arm and left a print of wet wet wettttt. I like when he rubs his dick between my legs. I especially like when he does it from behind and he is between my locked thighs and I don’t have to worry about the expressions I make. But he was on top of me and I wanted him in me so badly. At some point, I put my hand up against his stomach, holding him up a few inches so that only the tip of him was able to go in me and I’m sure I was smiling. Every time I opened my eyes he was smiling at me. I ended up on top of him and slipped him out when he groaned that he was going to come and semen spilled onto his chest. He wiped it off with his briefs and then wore them, which I told him was gross as hell, but there wasn’t anything else to use in the empty, cold house and we were cold and tired and lazy. If we continue to have sex, we’ll be using condoms. I don’t need the stress in my life of having to worry if I’m pregnant. Though I know the chances are slim, it makes me so anxious that I feel like my hair might start to fall out, and I become so angry at him. Also if we wore condoms he would last longer, which would be nice because without a condom it is maybe too much stimulation or something and he comes so quickly… I like when he helps me clean myself off though. Helps wipe the cum off of my torso with a towel or napkin. I like how it isn’t shameful or awkward and we-- or he-- is comfortable being just naked and there. And he doesn’t mind when I am on top and he comes onto his stomach. I never thought I’d be that girl who was stupid enough to use the pull-out method. I’m not on birth control to control birth, but to control my mood swings around my period and my acne. I ran out at the start of this month, but I take it for me, not for anyone else to take advantage of.

I liked when he wraps his arms around me, hugging me from behind. He is tall enough that it completely envelops me. Kissing him doesn’t make me burn, but when he kisses my neck after we’ve woken up from a nap and I am facing away from him, his touch leaves a mark and he can’t see it, but I’m smiling. I don’t like when he sucks on my breasts or goes down on me. I don’t know why. It feels good but I don’t really like it when he does it… maybe because he goes cross-eyed when he goes down on me or it doesn’t really stimulate me that much when he sucks on my breast. His hair is everywhere in my bed. Short, black hairs, shed like from a dog, and it makes me crazy but it doesn’t gross me out. I think he will continue talking to me. I’ll keep responding. Long distance things are not for the uncommitted. I am too young and too sad and too lonely and too blasée to not want to sleep with someone here. Luckily, I don’t leave the house or interact with people my age. There isn’t really any point anyway. I just confuse people and complicate their lives. And it makes me even more anxious.

3/15/14 “Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need to take rather frequent holidays” Brave New World Foreword

“And what has humankind been searching for since the dawn of time but to levitate, to escape from the force of gravity, to escape from these lead-soled shoes.” Absinthe Documentary

I haven’t seen Wolf of Wall Street, or whatever movie with Leo DiCaprio in which, as he puts it, “consumes enough drugs to sedate Manhattan” on a daily basis. I want this. Is that wrong? I want to be in a stable job or in a business where I don’t have to worry about being drug tested and can do what I want with my free time and private life. I want to hit my bowl every night before bed, relax all the muscles in my body, clear my head of all the bad by clouding it up, and be able to close my eyes and focus on a good memory until I am thickly asleep. Do they test for oxycontin or xanax in drug tests? These are my alternatives. I have only gotten enough a few times, less than I can count on one hand, to be able to get the full effects-- my body numb in a pleasant way and my head running smoothly and undisturbed as I lay spread out on the couch, completely unmoving. It feels good. Calm. Like being underwater, I am alert and aware of the surroundings but held down by stronger gravity, a greater pressure, soothing like being swaddled like a baby. Marijuana makes me move. I can put on my soundproof headphones and lay out on my floor and do yoga, feeling every muscle in my body, absolutely focused on each feeling, the strain as I contort on the ground. I feel beautiful when I look at myself in the mirror high. I don’t know why that is. I see myself differently. I like to rub moisturizing lotion on myself… and then put it in the basket… because I like the feeling of touching my own body, the contours of my clavicle against my skin, the slopes of my legs, the nape of my neck. While barbiturates weigh down the lead-soled shoes even more, dragging me farther into the depths, marijuana lifts me above, and I am floating like Aries, wings exchanged for lead, coasting and content.

The ‘War on Drugs’ will undoubtedly fail. It is intrinsically opposed to human nature, and we are paying the price in jail space, money, livelihoods… justice. I am prescribed 40mg of Prozac   .5mg of Klonopin & 3mg of Wellbutrin a day.

And it is not enough. The drug companies are able to buy politicians as lobbyists to maintain an unreasonably high price on medication and continue to be maliciously successful. Ground up, unrecognizable, processed chalky substances in colored pill form or the bud of a plant.

Cigarettes are legal. You can feel the damage as it is being done with each inhalation-- the burn in your throat and the sick, toxic smell eroding eroding. Smoker’s cough- listening to a person hack up a lung. Unable to go through the day without taking a break to assault their lungs, leave cigarette butts littered on the ground, thrown out car windows. Fuck the environment. When you treat your body like an ashtray, the world is one too. Why is that okay, when I JUST WANT TO HIT UNPROCESSED, NON-HARMFUL, NON-CANCEROUS BUD TO SLEEP. Not smoke to get through the day, but to put me to sleep. Zzzquil gives me strange, upsetting dreams or maybe makes me remember them and leaves me feeling sluggish and groggy and tastes terrible. But it is readily available. My parents told me I shouldn’t take too much Zzzquil because it’s unhealthy for my sleep pattern. Then they gave me advil PM to get me to sleep. Fuck you. Fuck all of it. I understand what it feels like to be gay, to be different, ostracized. I understand what it means to be persecuted for who you know you are and what you know you want by blind, fumbling hypocrites whose minds have been closed so long they have rusted shut.

We forget history.

Many in my Vietnamese family became Republicans after fleeing to America. Do they not remember being raised on food stamps in order to survive, being given that aid and an extra push to a family of seven children, fled and penniless from their war-torn country? Do they realize that this aid which embarrassed them so much, allowed them ALL to be successful, thriving adults in comfortably large houses, happy with their careers, putting their children through college?

We forget the absurdity of a society once unaccepting of interracial marriage as we argue against love between people we do not know, will never meet, whose lives will not affect ours. We talk about the sanctity of marriage being destroyed by people getting pleasure in their private lives whilst we have mistresses on the side, fuck prostitutes, keep horrifying pornography. “God” is great, God is good, because he is everything we want him to be. God is us, each of us individually, and to find God, as we call it, is to find oneself. There is a difference between pondering the greater meanings of life and travelling or reading or getting an education to find meaning in yourself, in your life. YOU. Versus reading a book written thousands of years ago. I don’t even know the date of the second world war. I don’t know the age of the Earth. People STILL BELIEVE that theories are NOT fact. People still do not believe in evolution. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. It is beyond comprehension to me. If your God is trapped in an irrelevant book, trapped in the walls of a church if you sleep through the sermons on the hard wooden pews, then you are trapped. My cousin became religious after his teammate was seriously injured playing a sport and the religious group reached out to him and showed not only the injured boy, but my cousin, compassion and unexpected unconditional love. God, to him, is love in other people. He is a happy person, social and well loved by his family and friends. He loves others and brings them happiness. These beliefs adhered to his inner self, planted the seed and watered it and helped him to blossom into a being made of light and love.

God, to me, is every bit of matter in existence. God is in the fractals naturally occurring in plants and nature, so intricate that it takes immense work for our minds to understand it in the slightest. God is standing at the top of a mountain and climbing out of the cave we live in and accepting all that has been made without our help, without our knowledge. Thriving. God is the dead bird outside of the dormitory at the CIA, legs stuck out into the air, feathers lightly shimmering blue. God is the bird rotting in the bushes. God is the recycled atoms and iotas of LIFE that create and recreate and recreate. Explain birth to me. Explain how two cells become a functioning, unique individual. Explain how we know more about the surface of Mars than of our own ocean. God, to me, is everything, and it is impossible to ever know. God is the birth of everything, the two cells becoming a GALAXY of incomprehensible size, the creation of MAN, our thoughts, and our massless souls and everything else possible. Maybe this is why I can’t get out of bed. The news hurts me because other people are destroying my God. Processed foods, ignorance, a stunted quest for knowledge, an obsession with THINGS and Kim Kardashian and MONEY, whilst we walk on and are MADE of the same matter as dinosaurs, people, STARS. We are all God and it is in our nature to suffer. I can’t get out of bed sometimes. I want to accelerate the process. I want to disintegrate into structures of other forms of life. I don’t want to dress myself in a way that is acceptable to others. I don’t want to deal with the stupidity of people’s conceptions of the matter of my being. Asian, female, American, short… as if we do not contain fragments of each other… as if we were made of different matter, different RACES categorizing matter by what does NOT matter - how we look and talk and dress, where we are from, how we speak… I can’t even… Can God be a cancer? Eventually everything must succomb to death, yes? Are humans part of the process of Earth’s death? The consumption of all resources in a cell until necrosis. Black holes? I tried to read A Brief History of Time but could not FATHOM it. I imagine that having the mind of Stephen Hawking is almost unbearable. The closest of most to understand or infer the cause of all being, the vast universe, while trapped in a body of matter that will not function for him. Black holes he understands. Matter expanding into something from nothing, but what do we do with that knowledge? We don’t understand the matter that kills us, there is no “cure” for death. Let it be. Let everything be. Let God…

I don’t know what I am saying. I am a hypocrite and a vain fool and premolded a certain way. I barely know how much I do not know. But it is a lot.

Sometimes I wonder if I am a bad driver because of my matter, or because of people’s conceptions of my matter, which is constantly jokingly told to me. I wonder if I am a bad driver at all.

What does it mean to be me? How is it that my sister has her own personality, innately existing within her. A God in her head of her own. Every one of us.

Speed up the process. I am watching my God die.

Love and sex and sexuality, Plato and Aristotle, the defect(?) in my mental matter, blood cells, valves, chocolate, the skin cells shedded constantly from our bodies, the bugs in my sister’s room that were attracted to the sugary trash she didn’t throw away. The personality of ANIMALS. I can’t see it all and will never know it all but I can be a part of it all, molecules freed from this shell… Spilled out into the earth and strewn around and around like the precipitation and rain cycle we learned about in third grade. Around and around like the planets and stars to central points, around and around and dying and giving birth.

I want to die.

I can’t stand people as a whole. All of us, even myself. We forget our history. We can barely remember our own memories accurately, but we get older and stop questioning, asking WHY am I doing this? WHAT is the purpose? I believe that if you asked this question with everything you did, you would be able to avoid the mindless lull of routine and find reason in life. Why am I stopping at this stop sign? To avoid hurting anyone. If it is the middle of the night and there are no cars, is it moral to go against the law and ignore the stop sign? No. If you are sure no one will get hurt, there is no reason to stop. The cameras that automatically take pictures of your car when you stop too far past the line infuriate me. Let real people decide what is right, what is safe, instead of a machine fixed for one purpose, focused on one line. People learn to avoid the camera spots. It does not make them better drivers, it just conditions them to act a certain way at a certain place. Are we safer? And the county gets a large part of their income from these camera traps, I’m sure. Traps. Another example- in baking, some a obsessed with wearing gloves. I was told to wear gloves while piping dense, pre-made muffin mix into molds. “Always wear gloves in case the chef comes by!”, I was told. WHY do we wear gloves? To protect people from spreading diseases through touch. Does this help with the muffins that are going to be baked in a 375 degree oven for nearly half an hour? No. It is a waste of plastic. Waste waste waste. I want to be in France. I want to have been born in France, raised in France. Solidly French. I want to speak like making words into song, draw out my vowels, deepen my inflections. I read an article that said that people have different personalities associated with different languages they speak. I believe it. I am a different person when I speak French. If I spoke it fluently, I could exist in Europe as an entirely different person, I believe, unrecognizable to the lazy, unhealthy, isolated, antisocial, unromantic, anxious, drug seeking person that I am.

I am not high right now. This is me.

Me, who gets lost for hours when walking the dog. Me, who is terrible at remembering names. Me, content to lock myself away in my own ivory tower, hardly scalable by even my closest family members. Me, who can feel the Prozac lodged in my throat, dry and uncomfortable. Me, still infatuated with a boy I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. Me, who regularly cries while driving for reasons I don’t even know. Me, who can’t sleep normally. Passed out at eleven tonight and woke up at two AM, wide awake and didn’t nap at all today. Passed out at eleven exhausted, and still, up two hours later. Me, whose most calming activities are doing useless art projects. Hot glue gun messes, torn fabric and unusable, unneeded items. Me, who does not believe in people-- does not believe in God-- but has faith in both. Me, in THIS skin, with THESE teeth and nails and bad vision and pores and sweat and hair. Me me ME I am a vain fool.

3/16/14

In high school, we used to smoke K2 when we couldn’t get a hold of weed. It was a different high. I scarier, messier, muddier high. The type of high people stereotype as a usual high-- too much giggling over nothing, unable to carry a conversation or finish a thought, eyes wide open but everything blurry, indistinguishable. Once Mariel and I were at Zoe’s house and smoked a bowl of K2 in her basement. Usually she partook, but this time Zoe didn’t… she wanted a clear head for something she had to do later. Mariel and I did our usual ‘smoke until you feel it’ routine and were absolutely fucked up in the head after a bit. I remember we were looking at pictures and laughing hysterically and it scared Zoe. I don’t want to imagine what we were like, seeing us from outside the haze. It would have scared me too.

We smoked salvia a few times too. Once in Mariel’s backyard  when we went ‘camping’... an excuse to get fucked up out of sight from her parents. I took a hit, then sat glued to my collapsable chair as I voiced my concern about the tree above me warping like a mirage. It only lasted maybe two minutes but it paralyzed me and made me feel like I was going insane. I was doing my best to keep control of my brain and barely succeeding.

Another time, at Zoe’s house, we were around a bonfire and packed a bubbler full of salvia. Griffin took two hits, Mariel, I, and maybe some others took a hit, and then all was chaos. Griffin tried to rip his beard off and panicked and flipped over the fire pit, as I was told later, though I watched the entire thing. I felt like the embers crashed close to me and I thought that maybe I should move but I couldn’t stop laughing and Mariel was laughing uncontrollably next to me, both of us laughing so hard we had to sit down in the wet grass. I remember that I couldn’t control my body and peed my pants, soaking my black leggings and seeping into the ground. I continued to laugh. Lucy put me and Mariel in ‘Time Out’, by making our cackling duo sit in a corner of the lawn while the boys restrained Griffin and calmed him down.

Are these things people normally do in high school?

Ari II: The first time I talked to him was in the computer lab at the CIA. The ancient school is terrible with technology and I couldn’t remember the domain name for my email or find the link for it anywhere so I swore a bit at the computer and then leaned around the wooden divider to my right to ask the person next to me what the email domain was. He had thick glasses and jet black hair and answered my question.

One day, in Baking Fundy’s, he was in my class to learn about baking for a job he was taking. I remember seeing Chef stand in the corner and watch him judgmentally as the culinarian bent with his knee on the ground to hastily and messily fill his bowl with flour. He piped out profiteroles like he was piping out mashed potatoes and just looking at them I knew that they weren’t going to rise correctly. He looked up at me when I came up to Chef and asked him if we could eat some of the goodies another Bakeshop had brought in. I complained when he told us ‘No’, but mainly I asked just to get the boy to notice me. Miranda told me she liked him… She liked every male she saw… and just to mess with her I told her I wanted to sit on his face and she took that as a challenge to talk to him and make him like her.

He was friends with Erica so I asked about him and later on apparently he asked about me so she tried to set that up. One day, in the hall, he asked for my number to hang out sometime, as he said, and I gave it to him, surprised.

He texted me that night and ended up smoking with us by the river and drinking in the dorms. He lived off campus. I think he was my age. He had never spent time on campus. It was strange having him around my friends… a new guy when they all knew I was sleeping with Dan too, but they were not the type to judge. David hit on him and we laughed. Ari made strange conversation and I kind of sat back on the rug and watched the scene. Later, he drove me to his apartment right across the road from the school and we smoked a joint on the swings of the playground at his housing complex. I had to go back to campus at one point to give David his keycard that I had accidentally kept, but after sitting on my room trying to decide if I should go back with Ari, knowing that I wanted to but at the same time didn’t… He texted me wondering what was going on and if I was coming back with him. I probably left him idling in front of my dorm for half an hour. I got back in his white car. He told me he had a pool in the complex, up the hill from the playground, and we scaled the fence and I stripped off my clothes and jumped in. He told me he wasn’t wearing any underwear and I thought that was hilarious for some reason, but he stripped naked and jumped in the pool too. I was wearing my UGLIEST bra… nude and falling apart at the seams and stained on one side with bleach… but didn’t care. Maybe was too drunk to care. I swam in the deep end, enjoying the silence under water. No need to talk then. He stayed in the shallow end and was so skinny that he was shivering cold in the warm water. I think he still had his glasses on. While he had waded in, I had dived straight in, slicing through the chlorinated water and holding my breath as I sunk for as long as I could. I joined him in the shallow end after a bit, figuring I should probably talk to him. He kissed me and ended up pushing me onto the side of the pool, sitting, legs wrapped around his torso as he stood there shivering and naked in the water. I wondered if there were any children who lived in the complex. I wondered if anyone could see us from the windows or if there were cameras. I liked kissing him. He kissed me hard and tasted like cigarettes… not smokey, but spit stained with nicotine in the best way. Totally culinary dude. He worked all of the time, was what I heard from him, and his parents didn’t help financially at all. He was from Cali and had never seen snow. When he asked to go back, shivering, I put my shorts back on and my riding boots, but my see-through shirt clung to my skin and was too difficult to put on wet so I just held it. He tried to help me as I went over the fence, but I didn’t like that. I sat shirtless in his house and met his two roommates. One had built a jungle gym for his cat, Alice. She was still a kitten and beautiful. I told them that the cat was prettier than me and she was, beautiful white and gray coat and large, shining eyes. Ari shared a room with one of the guys, which I made fun of him for because there was a spare room that was empty. I don’t remember his explanation. I think he played guitar? Maybe that was his roommate. I don’t remember. Usual, awkward me, kept talking at him, sitting on his bed, until he kissed me, and the he was taking his clothes back off. He took off his glasses and set them somewhere and I wish my vision or memory was good enough that I remembered what he looked like without the thick coke-bottle glasses that made him almost look like a bug. Completely naked, I asked if he had any condoms. Didn’t really do much of any foreplay. I remember his dick being pretty big, but then again he was such a skinny guy that maybe it just looked big. I don’t remember the sex but I remember laying back afterwards and facing the wall and he climbed back into bed behind me, having thrown away the condom. “I needed that”, I remember him saying. I asked him why but don’t remember the answer. Probably because he was so busy all of the time. He told me that he would just walk around naked sometimes, even in front of his roomates. He didn’t care. I asked him if he also didn’t wear underwear a lot of the time. I don’t remember the answer. But when I turned away and closed my eyes he told me he couldn’t sleep like that and I flipped onto my other side, facing him. And I decided to leave. He watched as I put my bra back on, looking at my chest as if noticing my breasts for the first time, and I hoped that I didn’t look fat as I pulled on my high waisted black shorts and zipped them up to the birthmark at the center of my torso. He asked me if I wanted him to drive me back but I wasn’t up for any extra conversation and he was just being polite so I told him I would walk the five minutes back to campus. I ran past his roommates as he walked me to the door and outside he hugged me, which made me uncomfortable, and said he’d see me around. Classic. I walked back to campus and only spoke to him briefly a few times after that. I texted him when Dani had just moved into the room with me and we had gone roller blading. I had been thinking about him for days and texted asking how he was. He didn’t respond, but told me later when he saw me in the library that he didn’t see the text until morning and said by then it was too late to respond. I told him not to worry, that same morning I had dropped my phone in a puddle and it was broken. I wasn’t able to fix it because the nearest Apple store was three hours away, which I only found out after going to three malls near me. My parents sent me a new phone after a week, but he never texted. Erica asked my in the dining hall one time, for him, what my deal was… in his words, “We kicked it one time and then didn’t talk after that”. That made me angry, and I raised my voice more than necessary, cup in hand next the soda dispensers, saying that he had never texted me. I was confused about why he was asking her questions when he could ask me and hadn’t made any attempt to contact me since, and been somewhat dismissive when we did see each other, usually in the library. She shushed me when I got to shouting about how it was just sex, like ‘thanks for the sex, but byeee’, and that was the last she said of that. ‘Don’t shoot the messanger!’, she told me. I like seeing him in the dining hall, liked seeing him through the window of his kitchen and tried to follow which kitchen he moved to after every three weeks. Miranda told me one day during IPP in the pot room that someone in his class had said that he was an asshole. He had been sleeping with one of the guy’s friends and then suddenly stopped talking to her, and she was upset about it. ‘So don’t obsess about him’, she told me. “He’s an asshole”. I wondered if he had stopped seeing the girl because of me… but that didn’t make sense because he wasn’t talking to me either. Eh

The next night Dan was kissing me in my mega-bed and I stopped him and told him I felt weird sleeping with him right then, so soon after sleeping with someone else. “I slept with someone else last night”, I told him, and he lay back and didn’t say anything, but was obviously upset. Then we had to talk about it. Finally, I told him that I felt bad about upsetting him, and he said he was glad that I felt bad about it. I don’t think we were on the same page. I didn’t regret sleeping with Ari, just hurting Dan’s feelings. I was also angry that he was upset because we weren’t dating, never would, and if the roles had been reversed I wouldn’t have said shit about it. I told him to leave… we would go out later that night… and was happy to be alone. We got absolutely trashed at the bar that night, ending up at Darby’s with Erica, her friend Ginger, Miranda, and Alex and probably being the sloppiest drunks there (nothing out of the ordinary). Two pairs of lesbians were kissing up against the windows and I dragged Dan over to join them. He hoisted me up against the wall and we made out until the lesbians noticed and laughed, leaving. The bouncers next to us enjoyed the show, I’m sure. That night we went back to my room and had the roughest, drunkest sex we’d had yet. I think both of us were avoiding thinking. I don’t think it came up again between us. Erica once asked me in front of Dan if the night we had been talking about was the “night with Ari”, and if Dan heard it and understood, he didn’t say anything.

I think I liked Ari more than Dan, maybe just because I didn’t have him. Just saw him from afar. Maybe that’s why I think I like all these boys… because I’m not with them.

I was annoyed when I found out his name was Ari. Any other name, please. Of course he was Jewish. He cheered, knocking his shot against ours in my room, and said, “Lechaim”, or whatever Jewish word means “to life” or something like that. Of course his name was Ari.

3/18/13

I was watching Beethoven with my sister today - one of those kids movies where the dog, a Saint Bernard in this case, is the focal point. There’s a scene where the daughter asks her father where babies come from in order to distract him while her brother sneaks four puppies into the house. The father hesitated and started with a roundabout explanation and Kate laughingly said that it was funny that he didn’t even know where babies come from. Children amaze me. It’s amazing how, like listening to a different language, we only retain what we understand. We make assumptions with the facts we already have, to later discover how wrong we were… Like how watching children’s movies as an adult and catching all the innuendoes is so bizarre. I told her that the dad knew where babies came from he just didn’t want to say. I asked her if she knew where babies came from and she said no. I was completely prepared to inform her, but then I thought that my parents wouldn’t be happy with me doing that… the corrupt older daughter negatively influencing her sister so early. I didn’t tell her. We continued to watch the movie. If she asks again, I will tell her. I’m not sure how I will phrase it, but it will be mostly anatomical - no vague “when a woman and man love each other” + stork = baby.

A letter to an older Kate -

As we grow up, we find that the truth about adulthood is not as glamorous or as deep as we thought it would be. People will ask you what you want to be when you’re in the “real world”, as if you step into a new universe when you go to college. As if your choice of work will define you entirely as a person. As if the only thing that matters in planning out each day and month and year until you have enough money saved to retire.

I turned 21 two months ago and you turned 8 last month. I feel like I haven’t matured past eighteen.

But this is what I do know; the only thing you have control over in your life is yourself. Your body, your thoughts, your voice, and your actions. High school is a time when you try to find yourself through other people… When everything you are is held up to a standard and compared with everybody else. Your high school environment will determine when you think the proper age is to first kiss someone, to first drink, to first smoke, shoplift, let a boy touch your breasts, own your first car, go to parties, have sex. High school is spent trying to find the right mold to fit yourself into.

When I was sixteen, I was upset that I had never kissed a boy, so I kissed my friend Nick at a school dance. I didn’t like him and he was a bad kisser. It took a while for me to finally tell him I didn’t like him and to finally cut loose from the expectations that I had and he had and everyone seemed to have that we should be together and admit to myself that I did not like him and did not want to kiss him anymore. When he got a new girlfriend, strangely I was upset. Just kissing him, I felt like he belonged to me. He really liked me and though I did not like him back, it hurt to lose that adoration.

Girls get pregnant at the age that I first kissed a boy. Even before that. And it is terrifying to me.

People will say this so often that it will become a cliché. You’ll hear it so much that you won’t even think about what it means, but it is everything. Be yourself. Do what feels right to you ALWAYS.

I think that is what it means to be an adult. Being yourself, acting as you want to and you think you should, and therefore finding your place in the world.

I hope you figure this out before I do.

My first kiss was terrible and so was the first time I had sex. Again, I thought that there was a certain age limit for these ‘milestones’ in our lives and made a mistake.

Sometimes I think that the only way to really learn a lesson is the hard way. I could never have told 18 year old me that in college - in the world - NO ONE CARED about how old you were when you first had sex. That didn’t define you as a person. All that mattered was that you were you.

Freshman year at Tulane, I found out that this beautiful, cool girl on my floor was still a virgin and when I heard that, I wished that I was too. I wished that I hadn’t put myself through so much pain and shame and hurt because I thought it was what everyone was supposed to do. I hadn’t found the right person and I hadn’t accepted that so I forced myself into a mold and a mask that did not fit and did not make me happy.

On the other hand, though my relationships with boys (or lack thereof) seemed to always be a problem, I really liked to drink and get high. By being able to do this in a safe environment with friends whom I trusted, I was able to find my drunk, partying self and control her. A lot of my friends in high school who had avoided all drinking and parties ended up going crazy their freshman year and having unfortunate sexual encounters. Some were raped. Some ended up in bad places with people they thought they could trust but didn’t know at all. I’m not telling you to drink or smoke or party, but if you are going to experiment with ANYTHING, do so with a person or people who you really, really trust, and everything will be okay.

The people that think that their journey is more ‘normal’ or cooler than yours do not understand that every single person on this earth goes through a different journey. They do not understand that there is no standard. There is no mold that you need to fit yourself into in order to be successful or popular. Find strength in yourself. That is all you have. Find confidence and come to term with what you consider to be flaws.

Don’t expect there to be a path paved out for you to follow. Don’t follow paths that others have paved for you.

Going through life is like trying to cross a creek by stepping on stones. The stones are scattered everywhere and you always have choices, but it is up to you how you cross - whether you backtrack and loop around, make a beeline towards a certain rock or let someone tell you where to step. (That was the first analogy that came to mind).

People spend their lives wondering what happiness is and how to achieve it. I may be clinically depressed and medicated and miserable, but I know the key to happiness is to be yourself and do what is right to you.

In Beethoven, there is a scene where a boy one of the main characters has kissed locks the door of the bedroom and won’t let her out. I hope you are not the girl who feels as if she owes him or she should do something. I hope you are like Beethoven and rip the walls down. I hope you tell him to go fuck himself and break his nose. I hope you understand that you never owe anyone anything. Especially not your body. You don’t owe anyone your time or breath or presence.

This is your life. Your universe. Your reality.

Tell the people you love that you love them and tell the people who you don’t care about to scram.

Tell the boy who tries to get away with not wearing a condom that he should find someone else to get pregnant. Even if you really, really like him. There’s a French saying that goes, “Love makes the time pass and time makes the love pass”. It’s true. The first boy who told me he loved me I hope to never see again and am content to ignore his existence.

Tell the student or the teacher who bullies another kid to take a look at themselves. Sometimes it is enough to just show that you don’t approve. Sometimes you don’t have to say a word. In eighth grade, after my mom kicked me out of the house, I went to live in New Hampshire and went to a new middle school and was so depressed and angry that I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I ate lunch in the bathroom. I felt like I was going to vomit every time I got on the bus and had to find an empty seat. Two teachers made fun of me a few times, saying things like, ‘Chloe do you have an answer? Oh wait, you don’t talk’ and laughing. I cry about it sometimes still. I hope that you are the kid who talks to a person like me and treats me like I am a normal person so that I can feel and act like a normal person. I hope you are the girls who invite me to hang out with them at their lunch table or in the playground. I hope you are a student who would think that something was wrong with what the teacher was saying. I hope you know that no matter your age, a person can tell what is right and what is wrong. I think that children even have a better sense of morality than adults, but are afraid to be heard or wrong.

I read about in experiment in Psychology at Tulane in which volunteers were recruited to ask people questions and electrocute them when they were wrong. With each wrong answer, the voltage would be raised a little until finally the volunteers were told to use the highest voltage to zap the person they were questioning despite their screams in protest and pain and despite their moral values. Every one of the volunteers went to the highest level, as directed by the director of the experiment. Every one of them followed orders. From this study, it is easy to understand how the Holocaust happened… how people are disposed to be like sheep - obediently going along with the current, concerned only with their own well-being. Maybe some people are destined to die for what they believe in. If that is the cost of living a just life, I fully accept it. The people who were being zapped in the experiment were actors. Do what you think is right. Leaders are the ones who stand up and tell another person they need to stop what they are doing. Leaders determine whether people will get hurt or helped. Please be a leader, even if only in the smallest ways. You love to tell the story of when Julien was little and he had his face painted for Halloween and he cried because another boy smudged his make-up on purpose. Be the kid who comforts him. Be the kid who tells the perpetrator to apologize. Be the tattle tale if that is what you think is right.

Tell your parents the truth. You are so lucky to have the parents that you do who are there to listen to you fully and calmly help you through every trouble you will have. I’m so happy that you had a normal, happy childhood and got to see what a happy, beautiful marriage looks like.

Tell the people who ask you if you get good grades because you’re asian to SCRAM.

Tell the people who joke about how you are a bad driver to SCRAM.

Tell the people who say you should lose weight or need to wear makeup or shave your legs or smile and be pretty that they have no sway in anything you do. I spent nine years of my life dealing with bulimia and sometimes anorexia, bent over a toilet, feeling like shit all of the time, starving myself or eating until I thought I had ruptured my stomach. If you want to eat only ice cream for dinner, eat ice cream for dinner and nothing else. If you don’t want to wear makeup, don’t. It is fucking hard being a woman in our society. It is hard to deal with double standards, trying not to be perceived as a slut or a prude, trying to be treated equally and to stand on a level playing field. If you want to kiss someone or have sex with someone on the first date, do it. If they don’t call back, they’re not the type of person you should waste any time on. Thanks for the sex. If you don’t want to have sex, don’t. Even if you’re dating the guy and he says he really horny and you’re already in bed together. Too bad. Even if you owe him money or he drove you somewhere and he is your ride back. Too bad. Tell them to masturbate or something. You never ever owe anyone anything that you don’t want to give.

Tell the people who say your clothes are too slutty or not sexy enough that it’s not their problem. If you want to wear a see-through shirt, do it. If you want to wear footsie pajamas in public, do it.

Don’t read the magazines that tell you how to dress or what men like. The only good parts of magazines geared towards teen girls are the articles about people’s most embarrassing moments or the stories about how someone handled or dealt with a situation in their life. Read a good book every once in a while, for real.

Tell the friends who try to pay you back to keep the money and don’t ever bring it up again or use it as leverage against them. Put extra money in the meter, tip your server 20%, buy the shirt you really want but is so expensive, because that is what money is for - to be spent on what you want. It is not something that should tie you down or stress you out. It is paper and it comes and it goes. Maybe you will never wear that expensive shirt or maybe you will wear it every day. I would rather have an empty bank account than regret for not going out with my friends because I wanted to save my money for no particular reason other than stressing about not having any money. You’re young and should have fun (especially while your parents are still the ones funding it). On the other hand, don’t keep material things for sentimental reasons. Write it down and donate your clothes that you haven’t worn for years or the shoes you never wore but love to look at. Get rid of everything that you possess that possesses you. Going to college, you shouldn’t be weighed down by half a dozen stuffed bags. Be free. It is almost physically sickening to constantly live with guilt or regret. Watching Netflix while your friends go out to a karaoke bar which you only did not go to because you wanted to save money SUCKS. All we have is memories and interactions. Don’t hold money above that. But if your friends try to get you to go out and you just want to stay in a sleep, stay in and sleep. We pay for everything in either money, time, or experience. You have to pick which one is most important for each situation. You can take the nonstop flight home for several hundred dollars or you can swap your ticket at the gate for a reimbursement and wait for the next flight - if you have the time.

Tell the people who compliment you, “Thank you”.

Tell the spoiled girl who is complaining about something superficial like it is the worst thing in the world that she is lucky to have what she has and she should shut the hell up. My best friend, Allie, can be one of the most superficial people I’ve ever met but I am always honest with her, even with things as small as saying I need to go home because I can’t handle watching another episode of Island Hunters or Keeping up with the Kardashians. When she complains about Elle Wood’s hair in Legally Blonde, I tell her to shut up because Elle is perfect as she is.

For real though, Kate. Do you. Be you. Everyone will try to make you fit into the mold they have in their mind for their world. Even Daddy will sometimes hear only what he wants to when you talk to him. Be yourself and don’t apologize for it ever. I spend too much of my time apologizing for what I do and trying to go unnoticed. I start too many of my sentences with, “I’m sorry, but…” and apologize too often for talking too much even if the other party seems interested. Be you and you will be surrounded with people who you want to be around and you will be in the place where you want to be.

It’s hard to take words and make them into action. I have been writing suicide notes since I was thirteen. I am 21 and live at home with my parents after being suspended from school for failing a drug test because I smoke too much weed. It’s hard for me to be all that I tell you to be. It scares me that I am a role model for you. It scares me that you’re going to grow up and have to make mistakes and get hurt and feel alone and sometimes hate yourself. Sometimes I think that the only way to be a good person is to go through hell, but I hope that’s not true. Listen to people and look at the world around you and be aware of reality. I think opening up your eyes makes you a good person. Read the news, travel, volunteer and put yourself in places where you are uncomfortable and you will understand.

When I think of people I have encountered in my life that I respect and want to be more like, I can only think of people who were unforgivingly themselves. Being yourself is like finding enlightenment - people flock to you and you seem to have an aura of happiness about you… or maybe it is just the glow of a strong sense of self.

3/25/14

I had a dream last night or maybe today… I’ve been sleeping non-stop…. where I went to visit Allie at PSU. It was a campus I had never been on before, but I knew it was PSU. I was walking through the campus to find Allie and crossed a bridge where students were sitting, facing the water, on what seemed like a long bench. I saw Ari sitting there and then noticed that Allie was right next to him. I sat beside Allie, but was excited and nervous to talk to Ari. In the dream it went well. Ari went inside to take a shower and I talked to Allie for a while until she decided that she also needed to take a shower and yelled at Ari until he got out. I apologized to him for her being rude but he wasn’t upset. We talked some more and then when he got up to leave, he ran into this girl who obviously knew him and they hugged. He introduced me to her, who was also named Chloe, and said that they had travelled around Quebec together. I told them I had gone in high school in March and it was so cold we spent our whole trip buying more winter clothes. They laughed.

I woke up today and felt like shit. I woke up and looked out the window and it was dark and snowing and there was enough that the trees and ground were all white. It is the end of March. I looked at the snow and went back to sleep.

My dad texted me today asking how it was going with externships.

I do not give a fuck about finding an externship. It is not even in the periphery of the periphery of importance to me. I do not care about anything. I still want to die in the quickest way. I want to NOT be in this earth. Especially not mentally. A coma would be fine.

I don’t give a fuck about finding an externship and slaving over fucking stupid desserts for ridiculous hours for five months before going back to the hell hole that is the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park.

I want to melt into my bed and disappear, especially to myself. I do not have any type of ambition. I do not care at all and this is me at my best, feeling less depressed than normal and functioning… Not that I do anything.

I want to scream so loud that the blood vessels rupture in my brain and I collapse. I will never be able to tell anyone how much I DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING. Fuck.

3/29/14

My father is frustrated that I’m not ‘getting better’. I came home from seeing Maura and it was obvious that I had been crying. I always cry on the way home from talking to the therapist. Sometimes the psychiatrist too. Just this time he noticed.

My stepmother knows.

I think that my father sees this as a tumor that can be removed or a collapsed blood vessel causing a stroke. Severe damage to the surrounding tissues. Heart failure. But you only need to put in a stent. Fixed.

My father sees this as something that is not a part of me… Something that I will heal from. But this has nothing to do with my immune system. Nothing to do with my blood and bones. Everything to do with the web of neurons in my brain and the invisible signals that they send or don’t send. Everything to do with neural interpretation of the world. As I see it. My life and my reality and my misery and my headache.

I will not ‘heal’. I will deal with this for my entire life, constantly sewing back the ripped portions of my soul and continuing on. I will not get better. The unfounded hurt that weighs heavy in my chest will not lighten. Will not lighten with medication or talk or kisses. There will always be a weight but I must learn how to carry it.

The things you don’t see:

Me at the table, eating breakfast or lunch alone, crying silently for no reason. Wiping the tears away, putting the plate in the sink, and going on to the next activity.

Me driving in my black two door VW, sobbing. Loudly. Driving on the highway and screaming because this is one place no one can hear me. Waiting at a stop sign and watching the pedestrians cross as I try to make it look like I’m not crying. The tear stains on my shirt and the mascara stains in droplets that won’t come out.

Me on the floor of my room, in child’s pose, crying into the floor… into my knees. Crying silently into something to muffle the noise and gasping for air.

The words circling my head as I listen to people tell me what to do… I don’t care I don’t care I could not possibly ever care less.

Me huffing sprayed vapors out of a sock because I can’t stand to be in my own head and there is no weed available. The last time I took your hydrocodone it didn’t make me feel a thing. I just want to lay there, comfortably numb, content to be where I am, what I am, doing what I am doing.

Me imagining every possible way to kill myself. Googling ‘ways to commit suicide’. Looking at anatomical figures of bodies online to find where the femoral artery is. How to cut it. Where to bleed out. How not to leave a mess for anyone to clean up. Imagining killing myself in the parking lot of a hospital or police station so you won’t have to deal with the trauma of taking me there or seeing what I’ve done. Holding my breath long enough to feel what it would be like to suffocate. It hurts in a way I can’t explain. Imagining if I could get a hold of heroin and ‘accidentally’ overdose. Imagine falling off of a bridge and the last sound I hear is the crunch of my breaking body and the splash. Imagining a gun pressed against my head and my body in the woods at peace and free free free.

Me, almost constantly focused on when I can next be alone or get into bed.

Me in public or in forced conversation, so nervous at times that I stutter, even with people I know well and like… Trying to hide me always. Trying to find someone with whom I do not writhe in the silence. Me, happy and laughing and in a group of friends, distracted. Drinking. Exhausted so easily by words..contact.. connections.

Me trying to relax every part of my body at night in order to fall asleep, but failing as soon as my mind wanders and my muscles tense… their default position.

Me replaying memories over and over in my head but trying not to. Wanting to tear my brain from my skull to not think of that… Not think of what they said or what I did or what I wish had been.

Feeling, always, like I do not belong in this world. Feeling always tired. Peeling the skin from my lips until it burns. Repositioning myself in the bed non-stop for hours hours hours in the dark wishing I could flip a switch and shut it all down. Wishing I could sleep and sleep and… sleep.

I had a good day today. Got my driver’s license. Sitting in the MVA, alone, in my off-white Gap jacket and high boots, feeling, for the first time, like an adult. Playing with Kate and listening to her laugh and listening to her eight year old self explaining to both me and herself why the characters in The Karate Kid acted and spoke the way they did. Today you turned forty nine.

I had a good day but it is almost 7am and I haven’t slept.

This has been the first warm night but I miss the cold. I miss the chill of the pillow that I pull from the open window, putting another pillow in its place to get cold too. With the humid air slick against my skin, I wish for the freezing breeze the smell of cold… in a warm blanket.

I took a nap before dinner because I was so heavy with sleep that my lights went out the minute I buried my head in the pillow. So tired that it was as if I couldn’t get up, was magnetized to the bed… The kind of tired where your head is cloudy. I understand the name ‘Sandman’. The heaviness enclosing you like bags of sand, the way it would feel to fall into a sinkhole, where anything you try to grab onto disintegrates in your hands and you slip slip down down heavy and away. The best kind of falling asleep. And all I did today was go to the DMV.