Haven't driven my car in too long a time. Stuck home, at the bottom of a hill that nobody dares to challenge anymore with frozen water pipes. I go to bed with a sore throat every night because I haven't drank enough all day. All that's left is whiskey and vodka and truth be told, I haven't the glee or the abandon to let them grace my lips. Nine days left to apply to college, the time is dwindling and every time I sit down to pass something more solid into the wind, I hear Bukowski calling, his spine cracked and worn to always fall open on that same page. That short story that I've read a million times over, and will surely read another twice today. I feel ugly and dirty falling into those words, like soon enough my access will be refused because I'm not enough. I sit at home and I am depressed but it is not with the grace or the lack of self pity that leaps from those pages. The snow wasn't pretty this time. It wasn't glorious and it wasn't beautiful. It's turned to a sad, gray, patchy slush, and sometimes it snows some more. Sometimes it rains. And then some. So I pull my hair back into a knotty, greasy mound and lie back to sleep and to breathe, and to allow myself to feel what I have refused to feel for years on end.
I talked to Rachel on Saturday, over the phone again, and I was nervous calling her. I haven't seen her now in almost two years, and with time comes change. We either stretch ourselves to be what we can be or we fill in the gaps with lies when others ask. Feels like I don't physically know her anymore, and to be true, I don't, but what to do what to do what to do...? She made me laugh a lot and I fill her in with the most unusual of details of what this place has become, things that I haven't thought about because I've never needed or wanted to articulate, and she laughs and I laugh and I feel alright again for a little while. I whisper down the phone, "I'm bored", and to my surprise she whispers back, "Me too". But it's not the kind of boredom we both allowed ourselves to keep just two years ago. It's the moving on, the changing, passing, wistful and wishful thinking. It's missing somebody even before they're gone. It's missing yourself when they leave.
Don't you dare fall in love with me all over again.