Day 3

My dad and I discussed what to do for the next few months today.  The verdict: I'll follow his rules and won't go back to California until next semester at the earliest, though we disagree on what I'll be doing in the meantime.  He wants me to participate in church programs, and I want to take classes at a junior college here.  What will actually happen remains to be seen.

I wrote this while trying to organize my thoughts afterward:

"Maybe I would be able to do this if my chest and the things inside it were made of clay and I could press them down somewhere they couldn't swell again to block my throat.  But my eyes are clouded already like my mind and my lips were dry so I wet them overmuch and they're cracking now.  Does your skin burn with the memory of being touched hours ago or has it grown hard like the red patches on my arms, hard and hot, making clicking noises like dense wood or glass do when you tap them with your fingernail, peeling off like the bark of birch trees in California?  Las Vegas is a desert both literally and figuratively, a vacuum figuratively but not literally.  There are no birch trees here, only gravel.  And rabbits your cat can corral into the kitchen if you let her.

My throat is so warm, as if you'd pushed your hands inside my mouth and stretched, warmed my insides but left them dry and stinging.  I can try to focus on what I need to say by squeezing it, hard, or bending my fingers back until I can pretend they're touching my wrist, but the clarity is so fleeting.  I'm afraid that this isn't just some temporary thing that I'll be able to shrug off when I need to.  I am afraid of too many things.

You always tell me that you will not be the one to change me.  Insanity is doing the same things and expecting, because expecting never got anyone anywhere, expecting too much and receiving too little, which is why I am wary of wanting things now.  Wanting never got anyone anywhere.  But how else can I endure these heart-to-hearts with you?  I am wary and weary of being sent places just to be with different versions of you, encouraging versions of you and pep-talking versions, people who expect more from a good girl like me and just want the best for my future.

There has been no evidence to convince me so far that heart-to-hearts and pep talks ever do anything.  There has been no evidence of anything, only of entropy.  And stagnancy.

You are what I thought of, terrified and triumphant, sliding capsules by the dozens down my throat and into my waiting stomach.  I had hoped at the very least to get a good eulogy out of you, as if maybe after I really definitively showed how much I hated you, you'd learn to accept me and maybe write memoirs about me and live your life in regret about how little you'd done for me, but I woke up gradually in the ICU, didn't I, with hallucinations of you moving my lips and emitting sounds from my dying mouth.

I hate you and I wish I could inhabit you like a still-warm bodysuit and be you, maybe, feel the slick of your insides on my skin and masquerade as you until we both died, after which autopsies would confirm rumors of what might be the most successful practical joke of all time.  You're less than me and more than me and I am sure that the scales do not balance out; you are so much more than me that it's visible even to you, though you strive not to mention it for fear that you might make me feel inferior.

My lips are cracked and I'd like to blame you, but the most I can do is keep wetting them and stuffing myself until I can't any more and one of us gives in.  It will probably be me."