sliding down your back and into the sea

do you think it's possible to starve off feeling lonely and afraid? i think it is, though the problem with doing it is that those things, and really any sort of feeling you desperately want to avoid, never quite go away until you feel them all out, and even sometimes get a lot worse. even sometimes, huh. who am i kidding, right? ha.

it's funny how situations can bring back ghosts, and with such force. you want specifics? be careful what you ask for, now. the devastator is leaving, someone who takes care of me sometimes--who i feel i've let take care of me sometimes, and now soon she'll be gone--and now that care sometimes will be gone along with her. it brings back the realizations of losing the constancy of my mother and father to a nasty disease. but don't say disease, huh? how about addiction? maybe that's a better word. accuracy is an important skill. speak precisely, and gain the respect of your peers in your profession.

you know what else is nice (and how do i mean nice here, i wonder, i honestly can't say i know)? how i'm allowed to threaten and maybe in fact come apart undisturbed. we all let each other alone when it counts, isn't that so? we are all afraid of one another. and maybe we should be, and maybe that's safer. each of us have our own trouble enough, so let it be at that.

that all feels so terribly wrong.

and remember, too, that doubts are a lot easier to feed than trust. almost without exception. and what's worse, sometimes stronger than any other part of you. or you, or you even, or You. but that can't be, now can it? no.

my professor's dying father told her, "we know how we feel about each other, we don't need to say." and half of me says, that's nice, that's nice to talk and not say--and the other half of me says, no no no, there shouldn't still be so much fear still, when things are ending, there should be those things said that have been too much to say all at once rather than all this talk. but, of course, not everyone is possessed of such a lovely mixture of self-doubt and self-importance, true true. words have so many different weights depending on their speaker and their writer, and even between the two they change. so.

that's enough.