2009-11-21, 1:09 p.m.

rant a little for me, baby

I went to do dishes and decided I needed music and came to get music but needed to write and logged on to diaryland but then remembered twitter and used my iPhone to twitter instead and came back here to explain how we get so sidetracked and why everything is now becoming too much.

Memories are shorter. Lives are longer. Friendships come and go, people come and go, memories flicker and fade and sometimes wrap their full-color agony around your mind until you can't see anything else. Pain is shorter; we forget why we are hurting. But there are more reasons to hurt.

I am so over-medicated and becoming like my father and it scares me to see that the drawer in my bedside table that used to be his is filling up with medication bottles the same way it did when it sat next to his bed, when it sat silently beside him, placidly containing all those pills to save his life, as he slept and then as he died.

And we put all his medications into a giant ziplock bag and packed everything up and the bedside table came with me. I don't trust it, it never did anything to help my father except hide his secrets and push everyone who loved him away.

I don't know how to survive without medication; I tried and failed and now I don't know what parts of me are side-effects and what parts of me are chemical imbalance and what parts of me are actually me.

But there is no static self. The Buddhists say. Identity as an illusion. Self-hatred suddenly makes no sense.

My hair keeps getting shorter and shorter and I tell myself I'm a monk and I bow my head and let my emotions slip out and away and I become silent, calm, empty. And I like it. In emptiness, anything is possible. It is only when there are things in the way that we are hindered.

I am a rock. I am air. I am breathing. Just breathing.

Life as a candle flame, never twice the same, flickering through every breath, so easily extinguished. I will keep going.

Now. Now. Now. Now.
Now.