I haven’t written anything in months.

Lie.

I’ve written a long letter, or two and not sent them.

I’ve thought a lot about what I should write.

I need to write about a few things, work out my inner workings first before I can pour this novel out onto paper, from formless shapes and feelings in my gut into real living scenes on the page. My life feels like a template, a storyboard or even a metaphor for something better. Maybe that’s wishful thinking?

I was sorting through my reams of crap this weekend. I have so much of it… but I found one of the last birthday cards that Dean sent to me. I haven’t been able to put it down and it’s sitting in my purse at this very moment. It seems kind of silly that I’m so attached to this piece of paper that I’ve not seen in a couple of years, but it’s become a kind of symbol. It was when he was strong enough to remember, to care. I know it was him because he was the only one who signed it. There was no one to prompt him to send me a card, he just remembered me and sent it to remind me that he loved me on my birthday. It’s things like this that make me wonder if I did enough. I torture myself that I could have done more to help him get back to his old self. I guess I feel like I failed him. I never seem to be where I am needed most.

I never seem to be able to think outside the box when I need to; to step outside of myself and see beyond the immediate. Why is that?

Why?

Listening to: I have the Touch - Peter Gabriel

It took me a long time to grasp the notion that power comes from me. Let me rephrase. Other people only have power over me if I let them, and vice versa. Of course knowing this and using it are two totally different things.

It has also become equally apparent that I am susceptible to my low self esteem. I have an overwhelming, if not pathological need to be liked and have behaved in a manner one might call chameleonic to achieve this. The last ten years I’ve seen myself get better with this behaviour - as in I’m not as likely to do it, but there are times where I simply do not feel worth attention and I tend to isolate myself instead when I feel like that. So I create this circle of depression that I don’t quite know how to fix. However, they say that knowing is half the battle and I suppose that coming to terms with these facts - as tough as that is, is part of that.

I need to know where this lack originated. My mother’s experiences with uncovering key events in her childhood has made me curious about the things that happened in my past. I don’t recall a lot of my childhood and I don’t know if there are things I’m missing or if I have blocked them on purpose. Soul searching ensues.

Recently, all this came into play. I suppose I felt particularly vulnerable because I was stressing out, because J and I were falling into old patterns, because… it was so easy to rekindle old feelings that I let it go farther than it should have.

The road to hell, as they say.

listening to: Kosheen - Recovery
reading: Abundance - Sena Jeter Naslund

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Also: double negatives. Saying it twice negates the negative dumbass! It doesn’t make it more negative. Example: I haven’t got none. Not only does it make you sound like a hayseed, it means the exact opposite of what you really mean. The worst? Irregardless.

Want a lesson in prefixes and suffixes?? Too bad.

The prefix ir- means “not” (Just like the prefixes in- il- and im-) i.e. Irresponsible literally means ‘not responsible’. Inconceivable, immature follow the same pattern. “Irregard” does not follow the same logic, nor would you ever find someone using it in normal speech because IT IS NOT A WORD. You’d probably hear disregard instead, since the prefix dis- actually means: the reverse of. Dystopia, disarm, disability, disfunction… you get the picture.

the suffix -less literally means ‘lack of’. Following that, harmless = lack of harm. Regardless = lack of regard.

irregardless = a double negative and should not even exist in your vocabulary.

Bottom line: If it comes out of George W.’s mouth on a regular basis then it probably shouldn’t be coming out of yours.

/rant

Thankfully my threshold is high, so it’s rarely that this cacaphony of light and pain overwhelms me. For those who deal with these more often than I do: May the fireants sting the tap dancing elephants to oblivion and the halo be washed away by rain.

listening to Recovery - Kosheen

~Pat Lowther

I was the youngest and weepiest of the family, frequently sent for naps due to fatigue, and thought to be sensitive, even a but sickly; perhaps this was because I showed undue interest in sissy stuff like knitting and dresses and stuffed bunnies. My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshamallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.

Margaret Atwood [Negotiating with the Dead, 2002]

Each one of us is a centre of life, a unique event inthe universe, and whatever our external relations to people and things may be, the absolute fact remains that we have to live our inner life alone even as we have to die our own death; no one can live our own inner life for us; and no one can go through our own death. In the infinite struggle of man to know this world and the universe around him, and also to know the mind that allows him to think, he comes before the simple fact that life is above thought… [Juan Mascaró - Introduction to The Upanishads: Penguin 1965]

“You have every choice,” Sionna says with her infuriatingly calm voice.

“Showing up in my kitchen in the middle of the night with your spooky doom and gloom is hardly giving me a choice,” he retorts.
“If you had told me to leave I would have had no choice but to leave you alone.”

“And just how do you propose I could have ignored the rest of it?”

“The dreams? The creatures haunting you? That would have been none of my concern if you had refused me. “

“That’s cold,” he mutters. The corridor is cold and the walls seem to seeps moisture, but it does not smell like water. It smells sickly sweet, and it unsettles Callums stomach further.

“Cold perhaps, but practical.”

“Practical.”

“As I said, we are fighting a war,” Sionna sighs and turns a corner. Light filters into the corridor but it is not the clean white light from the moon they left behind. Instead it is a strange blue light, slightly sickly and even oily – it makes his flesh crawl when it moves over his skin. Sionna pauses at a doorway and produces a key which she slides into a keyhole. The light seeps under the door, and between the pieces of frame. Callum rubs his hands over his arms absently, trying to ease the trembling that has spread from his gut.

The hinges scream as the door swings open and Callums eyes tear. The light fills the room and it takes several seconds for Callum to deduce that the light is coming from chains. There are thousands of them it seems, coming from every point in the room and converging in the center. Something hangs in the center and Callum squints into the sickly blue glare.
Sionna’s eyes glitter in the strange light cast by the chains that bind the woman; for it is a woman, wrapped like a fly in a spider’s web. Her head hangs forward, ropes of ebony hair catching the blue light as they fell almost to the floor.

“This is the one who is the heir to the Seelie throne.”

“Why is she chained this way?” Callum asks, his skin crawling with the energy in the room.

“She has been cursed; possessed by a demon of the dark vastness. This is the only way we can bind her soul to this world and control the creature. Sometimes she is lucid, but most times she is lost to us.”

“What’s her name?”

“Nieve,” Sionna whispers and the figure in the center of the chains raises her head. Callum is struck by her ghostly, terrible beauty.

“Sionna,” the woman whispers, her voice seeming to echo and be echoed by a thousand other voices. Callum shudders at the sound, but he cannot look away. “I can see you today,” she says.

“I am pleased,” Sionna answers, and looks away.

“Can you unbind me?” Nieve asks, her voice sibilant with thousands of other voices.

“You know we cannot, Lady.”

There is a pause, but Callum can still hear the voices whispering to each other in languages that he cannot understand.

“He will unbind me,” Nieve says, only Callum knows with every fiber of his being that it is not the lady speaking. His chest suddenly feels tight and before he realizes what’s happening Sionna is shoving him backwards into the corridor and slamming the door shut. “Fools!” the voices hiss from beyond the door, echoed by the eerie rattle of the thousand chains.

Callum takes a deep and shaky breath and looks down to see Sionna gazing up at him, pressing him to the wall, fingers digging into his arm.

“You are well?”

“Fine, I think,” he gasps. She pushes herself away from his body and he suddenly feels cold. “What happened?”

“What I feared,” she says. “The demon knows you.”

“Of course it does, you just introduced us,” Callum hisses back.

“Hardly. Nieve was lucid when we entered, but the demon took power so quickly. You felt it, did you not?”

“Yes,” Callum says, and cannot suppress a shudder.

“We must hurry,” Sionna says and starts back the way they came. Callum does not hesitate to follow her.

From behind them, Callum hears the Lady scream, echoed over and over again my a million echoing voices.

listening to: Glass Tiger - Don’t Forget Me