can I keep it up

I've been hanging out with this 22 year old since june or july. until recently, we saw each other once or twice a month. we'd get together and watch movies and work on little art projects. sometimes we'd get high and have sex. sometimes we'd go to bar. once we went to a sex store and she bought a couple toys for herself. I liked hanging out with her because she was so feminist, and queer, and cute. red hair, left-handed, pool-player, and she found me attractive.
I can't even talk about all the drama that has gone on in my friendship with her. There is too much, and the worst of it is too recent. I forgot how fucking annoying it is to be 22 and to react wildly to everything (and I am someone who has MANY reactions) and to basically be a fucking messy pain in the ass. Is that every 22 year old? I think it is.
Since she got a girlfriend, though, she doesn't talk to me about things anymore. I don't see her anymore. She stopped taking her bipolar meds a few weeks ago and has been more of a wreck than usual. With how weird she's been to me since she started dating her girlfriend, I'm beginning to think it's time to friend-dump her.
I can only take so much frustration before I cut off the thing that's rubbing me raw.
My loneliness has done strange things to me. I never would have hung out with someone so young before, but she was literally the only person I could find who even kind of fit my admittedly strict standards. I was desperate. Orlando FL is not the place for me.
She's away this weekend, and the silence has been good. I'm not assailing her with my unanswered texts or being confused by her ill-worded responses. I have begun to turn my mind from her and onto other things. I've stopped working on the painting I was making for her, of her dead cat playing the harp while garbed in angel wings and a halo. I have stopped mentally keeping movies aside to watch with her. I am releasing my expectations and all the things we talked about doing together. I am cleaning her from my mind. Sweeping out the piles of shit and discarded promises.
I've had to do this with friends before. But never ones I was sleeping with. I'll miss having the opportunity to learn bdsm from her, but there are other people and other ways.
She just isn't healthy for me anymore.

write, please

I am trying to remember how to write.
Somewhere, I lost the ability.
Did it dry up after my debacle with ex-otter? Or did it take my mother's death to stem the well? Maybe Shiny caused the drought, or it could have been my move to Florida to be with fig. so many losses and gains. so many changes. I feel another one coming; or maybe I'm already in its midst.

I hate it here.

why stay in a place you despise, except to be with someone you love? at what point does the pain of location overweigh the love of person? couldn't I just move away with minimal things and be independent again? here I am a clipped-winged bird, not technically kept but still going nowhere. I know it isn't fig's intent, but it's what has happened. the more I'm able to retreat, the more I will until I am entirely hidden inside the snail shell. now I'm lost inside myself and can't figure out where to find people to draw me back out. because if there is one thing I've learned being here, it's that I can do nothing on my own without feeling drained instead of empowered. and I have very little left inside of me to drain.

I get high now to pass the time, to dampen the anxiety, to forget about the depression. It is the only thing now that can keep me calm and alive. I would have resorted to suicide but I can't figure out how to do it without harming anyone else. No matter what I do, someone gets hurt. someone has to find the body. someone has to identify it. someone has to hear that I died. they'd all think it's self of me, but isn't it more selfish to keep something alive that doesn't want to be?

it feels so strange to write again. to type keys instead of swipe my finger. I barely touch my laptop now, but for some reason I can't write except on it. I kept poetry journals for 5 years but most everything since then has been on a keyboard. my hundreds of notepad pages, each with a title not mentioned in the poem. I was so clever. I was 20.

spending all this time with a 22 year old has been really fucking weird. in some ways, it's been great, because it's been allowing me to have more sex with women. that's awesome. but it's also been bringing an unhealthy amount of drama into my life (note: any amount is unhealthy, which is why I have so much trouble keeping people in my life) and I think it spiraled this most recent bout with, well, insanity. mental instability. mood swings. whatever you want to call it. I am ashamed. I was trying to be such the cool older queer, and instead I went nuts. because I'm lonely, and it makes me fucking jealous as hell to see other people have social lives while I sit at home alone and cry.

I've tried going to meet up groups. I've contacted many people online. I've frequented coffee shops. I would go to shows, but I hate driving, and I hate people touching me. My anxiety ruins everything. if only I had a psychiatrist that could actually help me. can't work. didn't like the place I volunteered. denied by the other place I wanted to volunteer. I dislike almost all people. I am fucked.

I need to get out.

Pantssss

I don't know how to interact with you without wanting you. Everything I think about sending to you is creepy and I can't help but think I didn't love you at all; I just wanted you as a part of me. I wanted to have some effect on you because you were such a fantasy to me. I never stopped being confused about your attraction to me. Every communication felt like a compliment. I still can't get over that feeling. I like people that seem like a challenge. Nerds are so much harder to crack because they can have such low self-esteem. Maybe that's what my problem is.
I want to think that you would still find me attractive even though I'm forty pounds heavier than the last time you touched me. It's been a rough four years. Sometimes it feels like I'll never get past this. And never over you or Shiny. I don't know what to do about it but I really wish I could talk to you like a person and not an idol.
I want to be special to you and I don't know why.
Maybe I do love you.
Not that it matters. I still love shiny, too, though his absence always feels more like a betrayal. I wonder what I was to him, too, and if he thinks of me. I wasn't as much to either of these people and I doubt they think of me much, or at least not as much as I think of them. Turns out they took parts of me I haven't been able to regain. My ideal and my kink. I miss having someone as interested in the outdoors and biking as I am. Someone fearless but gentle. Someone better than me at sports, and who initiated such activities. Shiny and I would have been a very healthy and fit family. He had no shame and didn't care what people thought of him. He would do whatever goofy shit I came up with. But I had to lead in those kinds of endeavors. Maybe that would have changed in the future, but he didn't give us a chance to find out.
I never knew why, from their mouths, they left me. I guess that's why I cling to the people that I do. None of them ever gave me a real reason. Logical things are so much easier for me to accept than that maddening grey of conjecture.
I need to know what I did wrong so I can never make that mistake again with someone else.

to pants

(gonna break one of my personal rules here and use the word "should")
dear pants, you shouldn't let me write you facebook messages just because you feel guilty that I fell in love with you. I wrote to say "I keep hoping one day I'll go to look at your profile and you'll have unfriended me" because it might mean I'm free from you. but i'm not right now. I can't and will never have you but I still hold you in the back of my brain. I keep you in the shadows for when I'm particularly vulnerable and need to pine after something that literally can never happen.
it's the grandest of notions. I loved you for who the fuck knows why, and you played the part of my abuser because that's what I was expecting. you wanted sex, and I gave it, but I accidentally let the rest of me slip too.
I wish you'd let me be closer to you. we would sit at the foot of your bed and you'd tell me that you couldn't let me into your social circle. I would never be on the inside. and ever since you told me that, I have been flinging myself onto that barrier in one way or another.
I loved riding my bike to your place at 2am so I could whip you physically while you emotionally restrained me. I liked how secretive it felt, like I was something you didn't want anyone else to know about. at the same time, I wanted you to acknowledge to anyone that there was something going on between us. and that night you vaguely compared me to previous girlfriends, I had no idea what to think. I don't know what happened.
maybe I was too crazy for you, like I've been too crazy for so many others. I fucking knew there was more going on than you let on now. you called me beautiful once and apologized at the face I made. you were a Providence legend and I am a star-fucker and when I found out you were someone else altogether, it was too late for me. but who was I to you?
you were looking for someone to fuck and I looked good.
I needed to feel like someone wanted me, in any way.
I mean, didn't we both technically get what we wanted?

naming the sins

there are so many things I miss about the life I used to lead: the way I looked, the clothes I wore, the bike I rode, the people I dated, the places I lived, the friends I had, the social life. I don't miss the jobs or the bosses or the stupid hours. I miss seeing bands and making do with what I had. Romanticizing my punk-rock existence with dumpster diving and garbage picking. making shelves from milk-crates and discarded boards left out for trash. walking around whole foods, eating from the bulk bins and salad bar (despite all the signs saying not to). I miss my shopping being limited to what I could fit in my backpack. making out with people I met at a bar, or from okcupid. running in the rain with von, holding hands, enjoying providence. I am so fucking nostalgic for those days and I can't do anything about it.
it reminds me of absolutely everything, everything, everything I have lost over the years. all the people. so many people. people I was close to, people I didn't know how to get close to. lovers and best friends and acquaintances and mentorees, and mentors. people I looked up to and those that looked up to me. I miss feeling full. I don't miss having mood swings so bad that they cost me all those people. I don't miss my depression (it never gives me time to) or my anxiety (because it's my constant companion) or the way I hurt the people that were closest to me.
there are always these articles online about how to get rid of toxic people. but where are all the articles about how to stop being a toxic person? I miss therapy. I miss using social work classes as a way to reign in my ego. I miss medication. I miss feeling like I was working towards something bigger than me.
I don't know where I'm going. I don't know who I am. I don't know what I am. I've lost nearly every part of the identity I used to have, and to be honest, I really fucking liked that person. I was living the life I wanted to be living, even if I was a little ashamed of it at the time. I still feel ashamed now, just for different reasons. now I'm too privileged, and have access to too much money, and live in too big of a place, and am entirely disconnected from any community. it sucks. and over all, anxiety pulls the strings.
all the people that left me, left because they couldn't deal with their demons and mine simultaneously.
I don't blame them. most days, even I can't deal with mine.
I miss the person I used to be, but I don't miss the way I used to feel about who I was. if only I could have seen myself then the way I look back and see myself now.
maybe I could have kept a few more people around.