Shedding a Skin

Okay. Obviously needed for some serious soul-searching and the old style just isn't seeming to cut it (crippled at the fountain) and frustrated and angry and devastated and scared all at the same time.

I feel like I don't even know who I am... Every time I think I see it and it feels warm and safe and right, either I get scared of it or it gets snatched away... sliding like feathers through my fingers. And what I am left with is the decaying corpse of an older me... Stripping back the black to find the old and brassy crunching, twisted red underneath and with no new color ideas.

That old shit isn't me anymore... it's not half as fun or exciting, and whereas it used to feel "right"-- something I needed to go through-- now it only feels empty and wrong and I feel guilty and a sweet, sad pain when I imagine how happy I could be.

I don't need this shit... sometimes I think I do and I fantasize about the drugs and the music and the sex and the flattery and the drugs, and the drugs, and the drugs! But I'd rather have B than any of that. But I can't.

I know, now, that I will never, ever, be happy with him unless he not only "solves his issues" but really and honestly wants to be with me-- feels lucky to be with me-- physically and spiritually. Otherwise, I will never have any kind of sexual self-esteem and I will continue to crave that kind of attention from other people.

After last night he will never again convince me that I can't be an ideal. That guy (the Stallion) told me that he had been masturbating about me since February! There is no need for B to cut me down like that and make me feel like shit. It's borderline emotional abuse and even though I love him more than life, this is destroying me.

I need to feel good about myself. He has to be able to give me not just neutrality, but genuine positivity... to respect and love me...not just accept me.

At this point, I don't know if that will ever be possible... I guess I have to just hang on as tight as I can and go along for the ride. But that's why it's so hard and confusing and I think it's why I let stuff like what happened last night go down...

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Later...

Left Lincoln Center (the humidity and the crowds) and downstairs with a book of Wallace Stevens on my lap and even here, on a crowded Barnes & Noble Saturday night, I am starting to lose myself to that blurring and floating and separation that used to be so familiar.

(Is it the drugs? Or is it the loss?)

Regardless, I am slipping into air.

Xerox, Xerox, Xerox!!!

To the poems now...