dracula's wedding

I want you to look at me and see that I am absolutely falling apart. I don’t know what I expect you to do about it, or even if there’s anything that could possibly be done. But, I’m being selfish. I need you to see that I’m coming undone. And I’m unfairly projecting my clammy desperation on you. Per usual.

Lately, I want to fill a backpack and run. From everything, everyone. I want to curl into a ball and simply fade away. I don’t want to watch the newspapers I haven’t the time or energy to read piling up on the table. I don’t want to watch her clamor desperately for my attention only to hear myself tell her to leave me alone. I know she has an emptiness, too. I’m just too self-centered to help her with hers. I’m too focused on my own. I’m sure you have an emptiness, too. But it’s nothing I can even begin to touch. When I spoke to him this morning, I told him I felt like buying cocaine and dissolving into a junkie in the bathroom. He told me he knew where that would get me. He told me I was being selfish. But he said he understood why I hurt.

And he said he loved me. Sixty cents and my love and you can buy a cup of coffee, he said. But it’s worth something. He said that I will always have days when I feel like running away. And I will always have days when I feel like buying a Saturday Night Special and blowing away everyone I love. Then myself. Just like she feels like smacking the people who affect her with a baseball bat. And weeping wildly afterward. The trick, he said, is knowing how to transcend the compulsion. The trick, he said, is knowing when to stop.

I can’t stop. I’m peeling us apart. I am destroying our relationship. I attack you for things you expose, then bitch because you’re reserved. How could you be otherwise? I’ve consistently shown you it’s not safe to be open or real. I’ve consistently shown you that I can’t handle your honesty. I’ve sabotaged myself by mandating your heavy shield. Selfishly, I try to pull you in to wallow with me; I try to force you to have things penetrate you, instead of letting them wash over you, the way you would have things be. Selfishly, my mantra echoes: I need, I need, I need, fill me, fill me, fill me. I give you too much power. You have the power to destroy or delight me in ways you can’t possibly know. I remember every single thing and attach your words like charms or needles to my heart. I need to learn how to let go. It’s unfair for me to give you such enormous power for myself and for you. You asked last night if you were supposed to divine. Yes and no. You shouldn’t have to, but it’s what I chronically expect. I love you in ways that are unhealthy for me. I love you in ways that are unhealthy for you. I love you in ways that will slowly, surely ruin us. I will douse you in my misery. I will bathe you in my anxiety. I will slather crazy up and down every flat surface of our shared world. I will steadily push you away. When all I want is to pull you close, consume you, I will make you not want to be anywhere near me. I am not a healthy person, and you can’t be everything for me. But shit if I won’t try to force you.

Like I said before, I am a cliché: a Plath poem, a Garbage song, a Lynch film. Only no part of my disaster is nearly so interesting.

That he’s growing little blonde chickenfuzz sears my insides. That he’s learned to hold his head up and has a room-brightening smile crushes my head and heart. I don't know what I expected him to be. I don't know how I expected me to be. I am unhinged, and I did it to myself. She told me two weeks ago that he tells her I’m great every time she asks. As if he even knows. As if he’s even thought to ask. Essentially, I disappeared from their world the minute he appeared blue and silent. Just no one’s willing to admit it, so we do this obligatory dance. I’d rather opt out entirely and call a wallflower a wallflower. I provided the crucial slice. But my being crucial made things too tenuous in the moment. And no part of the original motivation remains. I am mourning his loss. But, more, I mourn for how he wrecked us. And how I didn’t see it coming, even though everyone everywhere warned me.

For a gifted girl, I can be a fucking retard. I cannot strategize for shit. Which is probably part of why I have trouble understanding you.

I can’t make sense of why I’m so obsessed with marriage. It’s something I never thought I’d want. It’s something I never thought I’d crave. It’s my way of trapping you, of trying to force you to stick around even after I’ve spread my shit all over the floor and asked you to hop around it. Even when I finally flip and scream at you. It’s my way of knowing that we will share tomorrows twenty years from now. And it’s just another way I’m pushing you away. For yourself and for me. I know it's not something you want now, not even in an abstract distant way, but I can't stop myself from trying to back you into a corner and force you. I know where you stand, but I distort it in my head. I tell myself you’re hesitating not because you want to be sure, but because there’s something that makes you unsure, because there’s something (my crazy) defective in me and you’re not sure you’re interested for life. I tell myself you’re not totally invested in us. If you were, I think, why question? In part, this is because strategy is woven in your natural fabric and was completely omitted from mine. Maybe I’ll be happy when I feel like I have your seal of ultimate approval. Maybe I’ll just be a bottomless pit in a different direction. I’d make a hell of a bride. Frankenstein’s bride: no part itself attractive and the gestalt an even more hideous mess.

This is why I need therapy. I am looking for an eden that does not exist. Like you told me last night, I can be terribly unrealistic. It’s my divorce from reality that I’m afraid will trash our interaction. You told me if I ever read her online diary, I’d be appalled at how unstable she seemed, that she didn’t come off terribly well in it. How do I come off? Like fucking HumptyDumpty. Without any indication of how to put my pieces back together. Sleep might help. But it’s deeper than that. It’s him, it’s you, it’s her, it’s all of my interactions with every single person who enters my life, it’s how my heart empties as fast as my mind tries to fill it. It’s why I need someone with a PhD to kick me in the ass and make me sort through the trash I’m using to clutter up our world, the shit I’m piling up to avoid dealing with things directly and constructively, the garbage excuses I try to make for why I’m miserable. You were right, I envy them Sawyer, but I did that to myself. I envy many people (true and fictional) you, but I do that daily to myself. And, on top of everything, I'm too proud--I really wish I didn't need you.