Levick Avenue

This was a lonely weekend.  Friday was filled with love and laughter, but Saturday and this morning have been filled with sadness.  Yesterday I was scribbling and wasn't paying much attention to what I was scribbling.  Today I looked at the pad of paper and realized that I scribbled a bunch of balloons with sad faces on them.

I woke up early this morning and my whole jaw hurt.  Bruxism.  Happens when I'm having issues coping with life.

I got in my car and brought it to the car wash.  I left and it was still pretty dirty.  (Haven't washed it in a year or so, so the dirt is sort of embedded into my vehicle's soul).  I cruised through northeast Philly.  I ate my breakfast in a parking lot off of Frankford Avenue and observed the people around me walking on the sidewalk and looking busy.

I came home to my messy room.  (If there's one thing that my best friends know about me, it's that when my room is a mess.. it's merely a direct reflection of my brain.  I'm a disaster these days.)  There's poetry sprawled out all over my unvaccummed carpet.  My hands are covered in dirt from the car wash.  I smell like grease.

Last night I said to Alex, "I'm so fed up."  And I am.  I am just so fucking fed up.  I'm trying to see the sunshine in the cave that is my current life, but caves are caves and sunshine doesn't adventure through those.  I need to bust through the rock and head out to a beautiful meadow, but it's so hard.  I'm starting to realize that some things are just out of my control.

And I'm just so discouraged.  It's been letdown after letdown after letdown for over a year now.  I just want to be happy.  I want to look out my window at the leaves blowing in the wind and I want that to be enough.  When I drive down Boyer Avenue and talk through my window to the friendly biker riding his bicycle down the road, I want his smile to engrave itself into my mind and bring me happiness that lasts longer than a millisecond.

It's hard.  Life is hard.  Doesn't matter what your struggle is.  You're undatable.  You can't find a job.  Your dad is in the hospital.  You have nobody.  You are in debt.  Every struggle is a struggle, and every struggle hurts.  And I wonder, is this just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm 26 years old and I've cried more in the last past six months than I've cried in my entire life.  I'm apathetic but I'm also hurting.  I'm jaded and I pretty much give up.  I feel scared to know that it could get worse.  There may be years where it's harder than this.  There may be days where I'll feel even more worthless than I do right now.

That hurts so much.  I want to enjoy this beautiful earth.  I want to feel the cool summer breeze on my pale skin and I want that to make me smile.  Is that so much to ask for?  I'm trying with everything that's inside of me, but I'm starting to realize that this is not in my hands.  Happiness isn't something that you can just take whenever you want.  Sometimes, even if you have the most positive attitude in the whole entire world, nothing heals your wounds and nothing changes anything.  You look around and everything is still dark and empty.

I want to fill up the hole in my heart.  I want to run to Home Depot, pick up some cement, mix it up and pour it into the large empty hole.  But that in itself hurts.  I don't want to have a hard cement heart.  I don't want to feel desensitized or broken.  I want to find someone worth loving and I want them to have a nice, beautiful healthy heart that's free of cement and holes.  I want it to be sensitive, and I want them to be careful with it.

So how do you heal a heart?  Time isn't doing a thing.  It's making me colder and colder and, in general, just so careless.  It's a "if you can't beat them, join them" mentality that's growing inside of me.  If the world is going to give me a cold, empty heart.. at some point I am just going to have to be a cold, empty person just to get by.  You can't be a happy person with a ruined heart.

I don't even have any dreams anymore.  Where did they go?  Even two weeks ago I had a few dreams left and they seemed to have fallen into the black hole that lives in my chest.  I don't want a black hole, I don't want an empty heart, I don't want to feel jaded, I don't want to be discouraged, I don't want to feel unimpressed with this beautiful world, I don't want to hate myself, I don't want to be dreamless...

But some things, as I now have learned, are the way that they are. Like dad once told me.

Couldn't make it to 10

It's like I forgot how to live.  Time for a freewrite.  It's 3:34.  I'd like to do this for at least ten minutes:

I'm sitting on the floor.  The air conditioner is on and I'm eating baby carrots out of a bag.  I'm bare footed and wearing those yoga pants that I get so much attention in.  I'm wearing a form-fitting tank over a bright purple sports bra.  I like this.  I look in the mirror and see my beautiful little curves that fall in all of the right places.

Today I got into my car and I was determined to pay off my car loan.  But I drove past the bank by accident twice.  TWICE.  So I drove down to South Philly to buy a bike.  But they didn't have what I wanted.  So I drove back up to North Philly to the bike shop that had what I wanted, and I didn't buy one there either.  Instead I sat in a food court slowly eating a salad.  With each bite I could feel the tears welling up in my pathetic little eyes.

It's like I forgot how to live.  I don't remember how to smile a genuine smile anymore.  It's all filler and "I'm being nice."  So I got home and saw an envelope in the mailbox.  Opened it up.  Apparently my last place of employement opened an IRA for me without me even knowing it.  So Old Nicole is $908 richer.

Instead of being happy, I just thought, "Great, if I fucking make it that far."  59 and a half is a tall order for such an empty girl.  Such a tall, tall fucking order.

I just don't know how to be happy.  I went to visit my family this weekend and smiled fake smiles.  I left early because I just couldn't take it anymore.  I don't even know what to do anymore.

I swear, I just flat out forgot how to live.  I don't want to do it anymore. I barely make it through each fucking day anymore.  I said to my sister, "Marie, just making it through the fucking day is one heck of a fucking struggle."  JUST breathing.  It feels like such a fucking task when you don't even have a reason to breathe anymore.

Why the fuck do I even exist?

I hate what you've done to me

I'm going to get to the bottom of this.  10 minute freewrite, minimum.  Starting at 6:40.

I hear the air conditioner humming to my right.  I have the light on above me.  My sheets are under my warm legs- You know, you've slept in them.  You rolled in them.  Your warm body was so beautiful and I kissed your tattoos.  I said "I love you" and "Go ahead, go to sleep, I don't mind."  I went downstairs and talked to a somewhat stranger at the party about our relationship.  He was impressed.  He said I was lucky.  I felt like I was.

But then you broke me.  You broke me and shattered me like a piece of China and I'm still shattered on the floor.  No one even swept me away yet.  I just lay there as helpless as can be, staring at the wooden floor below me.

My life hurts so bad right now.  It hurts to live.  To breathe, to think.  I know I'm capable of great things.  I know I'm beautiful, healthy.  I know I'm smart, fun, funny.  But I just hardly make it through each day.  Even when I indulge in a smile here and there over silly things, deep down my heart is so broken that the happiness over silly things fades quickly.  A friend just leaves the room and I'm instantly back to extreme sadness.  I feel it crawling on every extremity on my body.  I feel it marinating in my brain, blocking my eyesight.  I can't see anything worth seeing anymore, it seems.

I just live.  I just make it from day to day mourning over you.  Hating myself with every fiber of my being.

I don't understand what I did to deserve this.  This better lead me to a beautiful meadow with tall grasses and beautiful flowers.  Never in my life has my soul suffered this much.  Never.

I went crazy last night and blew some of my savings by paying off a student loan that I probably wasn't ready to pay off yet.  I canceled the LSAT.  I returned my study materials.  I don't even want to live.  How in the fuck can I get a good score on the LSAT if I don't even want to live?

So I went to work and made it through the day.  I was more tolerable than usual, I think, because I only had one thorn in my side (you) and not two (studying).

My insomnia is back.  I tossed and turned for hours last night, eyeballs burning with tiredness but body tossing from side to side, unable to sleep.

Sunday was good though.  My mom and dad came down.  We went to Manayunk, then South Street for a restaurant.  We went on a long walk to Penn's Landing.  We stared at the Delaware. My parents told me that they loved me.

They love me more than I love myself.  I hate myself.  I hate myself for being whoever I am that made you not want me.  I don't know what to do anymore.  Casual sex?  Hiding from the world in my blankets?  Drinking myself to a stupor?

I'm running out of options.  And I don't even want to be alive anymore.

Being myself

"I fell in love with you and you backed up."  Is that so, Chris?  Because that's not how I remember it.  But I have shitty memory so I could be wrong.

I told him that we both fucked up.  We're both guilty.

Everyone keeps saying that one day Andrew will be having a similar discussion with me.  I hope not.  I hope I never have to hear his voice or see his face or read his texts or type his name ever again.  I threw away his rose today.  I threw away his pen today.  I deleted all of his texts today.  I am FURIOUS.  I fucking hate him.

I hate him because he made me hate myself.  I hate the way I look, the way I feel.  I hate how unintelligent I think I am.  I hate my voice, my eyes, my hair, my body.  I hate my soul. I hate the girl that cries in her bed every night.  I hate the girl that can't even fake being happy around the people that she cares about.  I hate the girl who has been binge eating.  The girl who was starving herself a month ago.  I hate myself with makeup on, makeup off.  I hate my skin tone, my lack of desire to do any fucking thing other than study and mope.  Study and mope.  Study and mope.

For about five days now, the only thing I've wanted to do was die.  That's it.  Just die.  What have I done to deserve this much torment?  Was it my lack of empathy when Brian was killed?  Was it the fact I broke up with Kevin?  Was it my backing away from all of the people who've fallen in love with me because I wasn't ready?

I don't think any fucking thing I've ever done could ever warrant this amount of mental anguish.  It's not fair.  I just want to be Nicole again.  That's all.  I've never struggled this hard JUST TO BE MYSELF.