#miseryblogging

R called me tonight and i had nothing to say

there were like 3 easy light things i could think of and then once you'd scraped those off it was just 'haha i hate myself haha'

and like, fine if yr not gonna engage with that, i don't expect anyone to, but also that's the only thing that means anything rn

go away and have a life without me, let me rot here, date shinier better people you've always liked better, like, at a certain point if yr not gonna hold my hand and tell me you give a shit then just fuck off and let me curl up and cry, don't ask me to pretend to be a person who's up to Light Social Small Talk

also like, [some bad parallels with B i don't feel up to articulating but feel miserable about nonetheless]

and you know now it's like, cool, i've done my casual check-in duty, time to go off and engage with the part of my life i actually care about

what the fuck am i doing, i'm a kind clever interesting person, why do i keep letting people chew me up and spit me out

(…because my mother, because my mother, because my mother…)

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how often do you have to be asked to a thing, and stare at the messages wishing so much that you felt you could go, or even respond—this is the safest warmth going, probably, you aren't going to get a better invitation, so if you can't manage this what hope have you got? Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. you will keep disappointing people in the same ways, again and again, out of fear.

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girlfriend is flying back to the east coast for a taiko convention, apparently—a little after valentine's day, not that that means anything. (B used to humor me in observing these things, and where did that get me? nowhere any better than this.) anyway once upon a dreamier time i would have tried to make that into something, maybe; would have thought, oh, i've been thinking wistfully about visiting j., i wonder if the two could be combined, maybe we could all get dinner or something? but where i am now is i learn something like this in passing and my heart lifts its head wearily like an old dog and then slumps back down again: there is nothing for you here, heart, nothing to get excited about. don't get your hopes up.

i am meant, i suppose, to stay centered in myself, and invest in myself, and, and, and… none of which feels possible or useful. nothing can grow here: the earth is salted. tempted to go to domina and say to her, how do you exist in this space that is meant to be sanctuary but makes it so bruisingly clear that we are never expected to be there in the room? i shopped a course on gender & sexuality in ancient greece yesterday; i might even take it. but how do you deal with being told archly, oh, for them it was perfectly normal to love both women and boys! unlike, you know, those freaks who do that today. and then in another class, talking about greek lyric and how much of sappho is reconstructed and saying, well, sometimes we have to supply gendered endings, so they could be male just as easily as female! so important always to prevent heterosexual erasure. why are these people so clumsily careless with our feelings, our selves? why do they get to be? and this is where i'm meant to seek balm for my bruising.

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there is so little that's good in my life; and the small sweetnesses that could be nurtured into growth, i'm afraid to engage with & inevitably kill. thumb black as mood. how do you tell depression from a recurrent grinding hopelessness, a future you can't see or believe in, fits of crushing misery that come over you like weather? i want, so much, to be happy. (audacious declaration.) i keep clutching at things i think might get me there, and finding i don't get to have them after all, or else they aren't as solid, as nourishing as i thought. like that raccoon in the video, watching with helpless bewilderment as its cotton candy dissolves ungraspably into the water.