Diamonds are a girls....

It's been a long time since I sat down to write anything, anywhere.

Sure, I've written some notes—some pages in the newest version of the novel Dark Wings—and generally held a pen in my hand just because I love the feel of it. It's just been a particularly hectic time, emotionally more then anything else, and I've found that there is SO MUCH to write about that I was afraid to start.

One of the things that I'm sure my counselor will advice to me is that 'writing down your problems helps you solve them'. Sometimes I don't need to write about my problems, I simply need to write. Just seeing these words form themselves across the computer screen is soothing in so many ways. I guess that's the mingled gift/curse of one who works with words; that writing is the ultimate release of ones soul—as I've so often quoted—and yet sometimes the soul and the heart and the hand feel so hurt and heavy that the words just do not come.

I feel I've reached a point that, if I prolong my writing stasis for much longer, I will figuratively explode from the inside out if I do not get some things down.
I had a dream this morning in the fifteen minutes between the first assault from my alarm clock and the second. Snooze buttons are a marvelous thing but, as I'm well aware, I'm more prone to dreams in that ¾ asleep, somewhat awake phase. And I have extremely vivid dreams.

The dream was short, but there was Eddie, and he was 'coming home' to my condo. The second bedroom, instead of my office, was his bedroom, with a photon bed like my own. There was a moment when I saw him in the hall upstairs and he saw me of extreme awkwardness, quite realistic. We both eyed each other cautiously, then said 'Hello'. He pulled a bag of marijuana from his backpack and looked at it like 'what's this doing here?', shrugged and went into the second bedroom. I followed him, avidly wondering what he was doing in my home. He was sitting on the photon with his legs stretched out in front of him and I asked, simply to sound casual, 'Do you mind if I smoke with you?'. He shrugged and said, 'Just a bowl'.

Note; I stopped smoking marijuana some three months ago—and quit smoking cigarettes about two months ago.

There was silence and he handed me some funky home-made pipe, which took me a second to figure out before I took a hit. Then, handing it back to him and staring out the little windows into the parking lot and street outside I said, 'Eddie, can we please talk?'. He shrugged again and then looked up at me and asked, 'How are you?'. I laughed and said, 'Oh, just fine. I feel like there's a big hole in my chest and I want to punch you—and you know I'm not a violent person against anyone... except my mom.' As I said this he looked distressed and rolled onto his side, hiding his face. 'What I want to know,' I said, 'Is what Dave (Note: My mothers new husband and Eddie's Uncle) talked to you about. You said he spoke to you and this influenced your decision to break up with me, he told me he talked to you, but not about it. Can't I defend myself, if he said something about me? Can you tell me what it was?'

Then my alarm blasted again, and I forced myself into wakefulness. There was no way I wanted to go back to sleep with that as a preemptive. I wrapped myself up in a green robe, fed my cat, and padded downstairs in bare feet. There I leaned up against a counter and stared into the garden—if a weed-infested patch of dirt is what you'd call a garden—and for twenty minutes let my mind linger on this dream, and cried just a little bit, and decided again, with conviction, that I'm going to stay single for a long time.

I'm afraid if I get into another relationship right now I'm simply too young and too vulnerable to really deal with things. I want to give it a while, though I cannot put a time table on it. A few months, a few years? I don't know. Whatever feels right.

I feel betrayed and I hate feeling that way, because in so many ways it reminds me of how my mother views her old relationships. Not only that, but betrayal is a strong word—period. During my morning think; I concluded that I feel things quite strongly. When I fell in love with Eddie, I really fell for him. I still feel strongly for him, though the feeling is not nearly as clear as it was before, and intermingled with grief and hurt.

If it were up to me, I would simply erase Eddie and I's relationship from that time in our lives and move it into the future, when we're both older and more experienced in 'affairs of the heart'. I kept thinking that this morning; that we were too young to be messing around with each others hearts. Though I honestly wonder now how long Eddie really felt for me. He reassured me that he loved me up until a month before our breakup, and then the words of David somehow, really, set things in motion that were not reversed... I don't know. There's so many unknowns because now I've cut off communication with all of those people. Eddie said both, 'This is a recent feeling' and 'This is a long time coming' in terms of our break-up. Confusing? I think so.

I sent an e-mail to Eddie not a few days after the break-up call. I told him, 'I'm not really angry, I just need time to think about things. Give it a few years and, when you're older and in the world as I am, if you still want to be friends... you know how to contact me.'

The sneaking around really hurt me, though. That there was another girl the entire time that he told me he loved. Yeah, I slept around with some other guys, but there really was nothing but sex there, no love, though there was some affection here and there. I was lonely. While I had no one to comfort and no one to comfort me he was off... fucking Roz. Reading on his MySpace that they 'Rang in the new year quite nicely'... when the New Year was Eddie and I's anniversary. These things really hurt, but I did not tell him, because I didn't want to appear in bittered, I did not want to be the 'tight ass' girlfriend. Now I wish I had let him know how things were affecting me; perhaps we could have come to an end that I would be a little less confused about.

And, above all, Eddie has always had his family so near at hand. Though they have their quirks, they're still his family and they love him. My family is practically nonexistent. I have my father, who is so desperate that he has become manipulative. My mother who, in so many words, is a psychopathic evil manipulative conniving bitch. My grandmother, who's suicidally depressed. My grandfather, who's get-rich-quick schemes have occupied a majority of his time—plus he lives in Panama. My sister, who is too young to be much comfort in things, though I do draw comfort from her. My 'adopted family'--my sisters family—who honestly have their children to worry about more then I and so, as much as they care, they're not... there. Not in the way I want family to be there. My Uncle Dave, he's a good one, but he's dealing with a divorce, a full-time job, a mother in an assisted living facility who is always calling him. Eddie's never had that family. He doesn't know what it's like to be thrown out and mowed down and generally in the gutter. He doesn't know what it means to be OUT ON YOUR OWN.

I have a sister that I barely know because my mother took me away from her. Eddie has shared the same room with his and, even though they annoy him sometimes, they are his family.

He doesn't know. There's no explaining. There is no way I can really do that. Family is important to him while family has done near to nothing for me. My mother may have been an intelligent person, and taught me some things that I still hold true, and my father may be close to me, but he's too entirely self-righteous. I cannot explain these things. There's too much to say and after a while I just seem like a bitter, complaining, angry person. I'm not. I've come to terms with the fact that this is my life.

I had thought, stupidly, that Eddie understood. But I was wrong. I hate being wrong, but it's a fact of life. I learn from it.

I want a family, but I make my own family. I have close friends that I consider family. I'm trying to reach out to a lot of them right now because I feel so lonely. I want my Matthew back, I want the comfort of Jackie, and maybe even that ninny, Casey.

Sometimes the words just go away with you. This isn't really what I had planned to write, though there was no particular planning to this writing. I just wanted to write to get things off my chest and quickly, before I got to work...

What do I expect out my family and my friends? Companionship; the same thing that I ask for in any relationship. I don't want to rely on anyone, I don't want anyone to rely on me. I just want people around that can be together, love each other. Love me. Because one of the things that I've felt very recently that I've never really felt before... well, no, that needs more explaining.

I've always felt unloved, but through the assurances of others I have allowed myself to feel loved. The only time that I have felt loved and really allowed it is in relation to my very best friends; Matthew and Jackie especially. My mother, I was always falling in and out of love with her—she loved me when I acted like the 'perfect daughter'... someone who wasn't me. When I acted like myself, she had big problems with me, hence the getting kicked out—and that was just for standing up for what I believed in. Her second husband, the one who molested me, kept telling me he loved me. That was bullocks. I feel love for Bill, my stepbrother through that marriage and someone who I still consider my brother, though I've had little contact with him recently.

The point is, I feel as alone and unloved now as I've always felt, but never let myself feel for the assurances of others. Sometimes I wonder if I'm really capable of having that pretty, life-long love that everyone talks about. I really thought I had that with Eddie, but through the manipulations of other people—by him LETTING others manipulate him—it was shattered. I cannot trust him again, thereby I cannot love him again.

I don't trust a lot of people and, like I've mentioned before, there is no love without trust. I learned very early in life to depend only on myself. I love me because I trust in me.

This may sound so very cynical, but they are simply observations. It's not that I don't believe love exists, it's that I'm looking for a love STRONG ENOUGH to really work. Everyone is afraid of love. I am not. I feel like I bathe in it every day—that everybody does. Do they realize it? Hardly ever. Love changes, love fades, yet I trust in it because it is very, very real.

I feel I know the kind of love I'm looking for, but it is very special, very abnormal. Nothing like the love that is often offered to me. Even though those who offer may feel it, I do not. Not strong enough. Too weak, too young, too naïve in the ways of the heart. I will not trust myself to these people again, no mater what they promise.

And I'm speaking now of several men—some four in number—that are currently trying to win my affections through confessing their 'undying love'. I don't trust any of them. I don't want any of them. Again, it may sound cynical, but what do they have to offer me? None of them know what they are to do with their lives; none of them can genuinely hear where I'm coming from and respond in kind with knowledge and wisdom of their own. They have fallen for my body, or my words, but not with me.

I've been proposed to a lot. I've rejected many. The one man I really wanted rejected me. I'm a little cynical... but I'm also, I feel, growing stronger.

These words have helped, I feel like that hard knot in my chest has loosened a little. Perhaps I'll write more soon but, as always, no promises.

Vous offrir au revoir et bonne nuit,

-Lady Teigra-