Contemplate Driving

You drive and you drive and you drive.

You see the shapes flitting across your windows.

You don’t feel your body but it moves in perfect coordination.

Foot, brake, hand gear, foot accelerator, eyes, rear view, foot clutch. You glide through the traffic jam.

Foot, brake, hand, foot, eyes, arms, steering whee.l

You glide.

Shapes flitting across your windows.

Your heart breaks inside of you, shatters in ways more dramatic than two long lost brothers in a bollywood movie who find out they love the same woman, who ends up being lesbian and hooking up with their long lost sister.
Contracts within your chest, tightening around itself, trying to make its self smaller.

You don’t like the drama, but what the hell are you supposed to do, you’re a superstar right now. You are evanescence in all her tragic glory.

Contemplate the physical sensations of emotional pain.

Contemplate driving off the bridge.

Contemplate driving into another car.

Contemplate driving off into oblivion.

Contemplate the transience of your neurotransmitter levels.

Contemplate your carbon emissions because that is way more long term than your little mood swings.

Round the Corner

I'm driving too fast
I know its round the next bend
I want to park here
But I can't
There are no parking spots

Cheese from the heart

I am silently screaming to you
Please love me indefinitely
Despite fears of looming inevitable endings
I will presist to love you
Like the fruit flies in my kitchen
From the hole made by my cats in the screen
It feels bipolar in its fluctations
and dramatic determinations
to endlessly challenge me
Indefinitely
(both the love and the fruit flies)

Define: "Body Issues"

My stomach tightens, I am a flower that sings and dances circles around Snow White. I wanted to be a dwarf, I wanted to be Dopey, but I got stuck being a flower. Pink paper petals surround my face. My mother on the side watching our Kindgergarten Snow White performance. I watch the witch’s mother, skinny, in tight clothes. Snow White’s mother in a short white skirt, skinny as well. I look at the mothers, all are skinny with one chin. My mother the size of two or three of them and has two or three chins. My stomach tightens. I can hear their thoughts when they look at her, “The elephant lady”, I’m telepathic, my grandmother taught me. She’s there too. She’s overweight, but that’s okay, because she’s a granny. She’s (my mother) in turquoise with golden sequins and turquoise eye makeup. Telling everyone look at me I am a circus elephant. I do not want to talk to her when the play is over. I am hoping no one will know she is my mother. She is an elephant. Age 4

My third hot dog dripping with mayo and ketchup. My stomach hurts I cannot eat anymore. I look at the two hot dogs left on my plate. I stuff the third one in my mouth and swallow. I shovel the other two faster than my stomach can tell my brain that it will burst

H shows me where he will build the glass elevator in our garden. He is white, like a moving piece of lard. He eats meat for breakfast, rare and loves the fat. His skin smells like uncooked meat. He shows me the wall where the glass elevator will be. He grabs my bony wrists and pins me up against the wall. Pressing his mouth on mine, his cheeks cover blocking my nostrils when I try to inhale. He lifts my shirt and traces my jutting ribs with his tongue. His hair smells like fat. My ribs remember. Age 7

Holed up in our darkness, we quarrel. She leaves for class. I call Pizza Hut, they will not deliver till another hour. I order a New Yorker with extra cheese. I finish it in 6 minutes. I lie down feling the energy pulsatting in my stomach, radiating all over my body. She comes back to our darkness, she touches my breasts. We quarrel, she leaves. I order another New Yorker with extra cheese. I lie down by the door next to two empty boxes of pizza. I touch my stomach. I touch my breasts, I close my eyes and I rest

I am the daughter of a red indian. Like the chief from Peter Pan. I have a long headdress with red feathers going down my back. I am wearing a leather vest opened. My chest exposed but its okay because I don’t have breasts yet. I am tied up, wrists behind my back to the bed post. H is a cowboy he has a beard painted on his face. His hands touching me all over feel like they don’t have bones just flesh that smells of fat. Age 8

She ties the strings of her leapord print corset, tightening them around my waist. She traces her fingers across my clavicle. My pussy dries and her’s drips I held my breath and her’s got heavier. “You look so sexy”she looks at me, I look away. The door is locked so her father doesn’t come in, I can’t get out.

Pink with golden glitter and a frill around the waist, the swimsuit around my body. French cut. I feel my like everytime I walk I’m going to get a wedgy. My uncle in a black tight swimsuit is on the chaise long. He has boobs that he doesn’t cover. I have boobs too. He has three stomaches when he sits down, I have only one. My boobs are the size of pingpong balls half embedded into my chest. I cover them. “You look so sexy”.

“What’s sexy?”

“It means people want you”

“What does people want me mean?” Age 11

A boiled gray chicken infront of my mother at the dinner table, my father and brother’s plates overflowing. Everyone has breasts and their bellies are hanging. A napkin is laid out on my lap, I secretly drop the food on it. I have no belly and I have no breasts.

I wore my mom’s bikini from the 70s, its cool. It has these funky circles and its yellow, green, purple and orange. Its not much just a few strings tied together around my body. My breasts fill the cups. The bottoms are a little bit loose. I wander as I always do, my diary and a pencil. I am trying to find a special place. Somewhere no one has seen. Somewhere I can record something profound and significant. I find a pool and next to it a big net. The kind you can fish things out with. He comes up from behind me. I don’t know him. I feel his arms around my waist I look down his hands are dark and his knuckles are chaffed. The synthetic material of his shorts makes the skin on my back itch, but his belly cushions my back. One hand cups my breast the other one slides into my bottoms. In broken English he says “You are so sexy”. I don’t record this in my diary, but I never wear a bikini again. Age 14

Not a paperclip

This is not a paper clip

It’s a plate

With white rice, ensheathed with oil

Catching

A reflection of light, but nothing

Else

Compacted grains

I take a forkful then

Push

The

Grains

Back

To

Maintain

The shape

This time I don’t watch my hands

Because this is not a paper clip

It’s a 4 fingered metal extension of my hand.

It has a pattern

It’s made in Japan

And it doesn’t have scars laced with memories

Its pretty dumb this whole utensil thing, except right now it’s saving me from having to wash my hands.

A cafeteria means:

Someone cooks and someone cleans

And that someone is not me

I just have to stand behind the counter load my tray and pay

Find a table

On any other day I would have probably ranted about our alienation from our food, today, I’m just fucking happy that I don’t have to do jackshit

Lessons of Impermanence

If anything, the greatest lesson learnt was from my bipolar disorder/order. Everything was fleeting, changeable, always impermanent. First manifested in my moods then spilling over to every other aspect of my life: My emotions, my desires, my thoughts, my perceptions, my beliefs, my relationships. At first it was hard; trying to maintain some kind of consistency and stability in my mood, my search for neurotransmitter permanence, resist the constant influx of mood changes. Failed attempts at mood stability, spilling over and allowing an acceptance of the transience of everything else: My emotions, my desires, my thoughts, my perceptions, my beliefs, my relationships. The ephemerality bred my “grain of salt” mentality. I have ceased to take anything seriously, my militant opinions, my dreams, my revelations, my realizations, my oh so intense emotions. Impermanent. I wait for my feelings towards you to fleet, I wait, I wait, and I wait. I’m still waiting. This scares me, I’m still waiting. When I woke up today, I realized they just got too damn serious and I couldn’t take them with a grain salt anymore. It’s been a long wait for how I feel about you to fleet. I’m still waiting.

Abandonment Angst

I was talking to my friend today, I was feeling very distant from myself.

So we reviewed my mood chart. The online daily record of my mood

Mildly elevated

Moderately elevated

Severely elevated

Baseline

Mildly depressed

Moderately depressed

Severely depressed

Mild anxiety

Moderate anxiety

Severe anxiety

Mild irritability

Moderate irritability

Severe irritability

Menstruating

Medication taken

Additional comments

Three weeks of my emotions recorded on the world wide web @ moodtracker.com right under

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Cymbalta

I was dis@&#@*co n@&#@nected. My friend who is psychic tuned into me. I was hiding in someone’s heart, she said. I said there was something under the surface, tickling, like scraping nails against a board, the inside of my chest. While I studied the cartilage and muscle of dog’s larynx. Every so often, the nails tickle my chest cavity, get my attention and then scrape. The noise is heard by every part of my body.

It’s 30 C^ooutside, I’m lying on my couch, my books surrounding me, a water bottle next to me, in front of my heater, wrapped in a blanket.

Phoenix my cat, climbs over me, like I’m not there. I watch a movie on my computer. The doorbell rings a few times. I do not get up.

I finish the movie, and in my chest her nails are scraping (I know anatomically the sensation cannot exist, but right now my consciousness perceives my chest as a hollow space with no organs). Her nails tickle the walls, moving against these tiny bumps, vibrating them, making them resonate in my chest in unison.

I vibrate internally

No thoughts

No feeling, only sensations

Physical

Simple

Panic triggered, I recall:

My best friend from high school.

Phoenix jumps up, someone is outside the apartment. The bell rings again. Her nails dig deeply into the walls of my chest.

I do not open, I recall:

“I can’t handle this, I can’t watch you doing this to yourself”

Moving on and away from me

My parents, their shields coming up holding me back at a safe distance

Mary (ex-partner who cheated on me) hiding deeper into her own misery to escape mine.

Resilient friends, who would pull away and return once the cloud of teenage morbid gloom lifts away.

I panic, because my current girlfriend (long distance), I’m not sure what else to call her despite the fact that that label throws me in a state of panic, is frowning at me.

Arms crossed, teeth clenched.

Well in my head she is at least, whether I’m projecting or not.

Lying pathetically on my side, not getting up. I feel this sense of failure overwhelm me. I can her in my head to the rhythm of the scarping lady’s nails, not blaming me with her words but the nails dig deeper and tear,

She says,

I really love you

Or

I love you so much

Or

I love you very much

Or

I love you a lot

But

I can’t handle you when you get like this, I’m sorry I can’t be with you anymore

Not an irrational fear based on past experiences with humans in close emotional proximity

I want to COMMUNICATE,

but the scraping lady’s nails plucked my recurrent laryngeal nerve and I

whimper