save your sanity for later.

Me: isn't ronon the chillest 3:20 PM
bb bro: Lo más chill 3:39 PM
Me: i just starting duolingoing spanish; it's for real 3:42 PM
Me: ... yeah that's why all the english fail. anyway, every night it's like "practice spanish" and i just pull up the next module and test out 3:42 PM
Me: presto look at my accomplishments 3:43 PM
Me: TODAY I LEARNED MY FIRST NEW WORD so it's legit 3:43 PM

-- Later in that same convo --
Me: dude i thot a/b you a shit ton this week as uz, you're my bb bro <3 4:30 PM

Me: i'm sorry you have a lot of reasons to doubt how PHENOMENAL you are because of shit we were brought up with, but reminder: u r an adult now& they can eat it 4:31 PM

Erika: being a good sister by only saying things that I would've wanted someone to tell me at that age.

---

I have always hated Arrested Development. My first girlfriend loved it, and other people have often recommended it to me, perhaps assuming that I would also be the type of person to enjoy Napoleon Dynamite (spoiler: I am not) or Ghost World (hated it a LOT).

The only reason I sat through that god awful end of the world stoner movie was that Michael Cera gets stabbed in the first twenty minutes (he does!). I prayed for him to come back and get stabbed again.

My iced tea should be like my mood: dark and brew-dy.

(Okay, I don't like my mood that way, but the sentence was too amusing to me to pass up.)

---

I'm watching my inspirational movies. I have no fucking clue why. Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (no laughing), Brave...

All except for that last one, I've probably seen, I don't know, 10 times at least for Finding Forrester alone. I think I watch it once a year. I don't watch Good Will Hunting that much; I've seen it only 3 or 4 times. I can't take the therapy scenes often.

I watched Dr. Dolittle too, the 1967 version with Rex Harrison, but I had to stop myself from ordering the 1967 set of the original books. I hate bowdlerized versions, even though the racism was appalling as a 10 year old and I'm sure I'd find it teeth-grindingly so now.

Still, I have fond memories of getting them all on interlibrary loan, except for the very darkest one. The librarians would practically run when they saw me coming, all those requests for books no one had anymore—I think I read out of some first or second editions, actually, sent all the way across Iowa from some tiny farm village with a library of 75 books that had never been updated.

I loved those books. It didn't seem so strange to me that Bumppo wanted to be something impossible, a white prince, or a lion, or whatever it was in the versions I read. It felt real. It felt right. Doesn't everyone want impossible things? Don't we hurt ourselves in the pursuit of becoming normal?

I don't remember much of my childhood very often. I think the memories are there; I just ... don't have them most of the time. But those books are a good memory. I like it.

(I told my therapist last week, I said:

There's no point in talking about the details any more than I already do. Because those details, they lurk in the spaces I leave out of my stories. They make themselves known by the explanations that stop a few sentences too early. They hide in the words I won't use. Details leap blatant in the things I hate about myself, in all of the repetitive scorn I heap on my shoulders, letting the self-hatred soothe me, weigh me down so I don't drift away.

Just read between the lines, I didn't say, but I wanted to. Most of the time I don't remember much of the years before I was 21, and the times I do I wish I didn't.)

I'll buy the Dr. Dolittle books, sometime, if I ever have the money.

Next month, a check I don't have is already spent. For the bassoon, for the loan, for an electricity deposit, for the internet, for my car's brakes, and the rest will undoubtedly go to gas money. Josh suggested I sell my bassoon, and undoubtedly I should.

It's ridiculous, a 6000 dollar instrument that I haven't played in over 18 months. I know I should stop holding onto these dreams so tightly, the bassoon I don't play, the stories I don't write, the trips I don't take——but it's dark inside my head, and I still want need to pretend that some day.

Some day I won't have three days of walking around like a zombie because I let slip 2 paragraphs of detail to my therapist and my boyfriend. Some day I won't pray, fucking christ, that the summer fixes me again. Some day I won't wake up and detest the mere thought of getting out of bed, that endless struggle which claims me more often than I'd like. Some day I won't hide in my room, hungry but more unwilling to potentially see anyone than even that. Some day I won't take my showers only on days when I have to leave the house.

Maybe I'll even have a job; I'll get up every work day at an unreasonable hour of the morning, and it won't make me want to throw up thinking of being around strange people, being judged on my performance. I won't want to hide, curl myself into the tightest ball and lock myself in a closet when people get irritated with me. I might be able to defend myself without crying.

Some day I'll read those delightful (albeit extremely racist) books and it won't incite grief for a little girl who was shoved into the adult section too soon.

I don't know how to get from here to that day, what route I take, what mountains I climb, what caves I may stumble over, gag at the stench of the bodies hidden in. I don't know which ropes of human support I can rely on, or should test for weaknesses, or can be confident in their strength.

I don't know. I keep walking. Ojalá I keep walking.