There we lie, and piece by piece I take myself apart. All those little fragments of not-so-flashy jewellery missing their targets and falling from the bedside table to the floor. The rings spinning in circles until they lose their momentum and they fall, silent. Mute. This is me removing all of those things that I had at some point chosen for myself. Hair clips and clothes and that silly, awkward smile. I am not about these things and I�m not sure who knows it, but I doubt that too many do. He knew me once, back before we started to touch. He knew me back when I hardly knew any part of myself, back before things had changed and I actually believed that we were made to, and could function on just love alone. My lip quivers because I am sitting on the edge of something so explosive and so beautiful, so much bigger than me or you or any of your family or friends. We are human and we are acting as such. Nothing�s unpredictable anymore, just stupid, and hurtful. I am failing at being around other people. All of my lives are falling apart, each in their own right, and to tell the god honest truth, it hurts. I am supposed to be in love. I am supposed to be a part of some tangible heart shaped wonder that our culture expects to grow and to take shape a little more each day. But love takes work. Where was that in your fairytales? He told me he loved me seven months, one week and twenty-eight minutes ago and I believed him because he believed it himself. This was before I knew how his hands fit mine. It wasn�t anatomy or any form of biology. It wasn�t any form of science. It was that feeling you get when you realise that your soul actually fits somewhere other than only inside yourself. But then we touched. We made it tangible. Don�t you understand? We ruined everything when we split our lives from two into four so that everything else could fall into place. I used to think I was good at maths. But I used to think I was good at almost everything. Back when we used to cut corners in phys. ed. because we were fat bastards and we didn�t care enough, Rachel introduced me to the idea of the Enneagram and different sorts of people and personalities, and we spoke about the idea of transgressing these personality types as we moved from world to world and from one person to another because sometimes one thing fits better than another (I'm a type four). This was after I�d realised that schizophrenia was too much to be me and before I�d come across the idea of manic depression. I didn�t think in terms of up and down, just in terms of one personality to the next. She introduced me to such beautiful things, that girl, and I wish she was here now to make sense of how everything�s dividing in the most funny of manners. I can�t think in relation to pros and cons because they morph and skip across the lines in a grey mess until one becomes the other. I need to stop saying that I don�t know what I want because I think in some deep down chasm, I might just know. I just don�t know how to go about fixing things for myself so that they might just work out in a relatively pleasing way. More and more I find myself thinking about Lewis Carroll � yes, the Alice in Wonderland man � and about how he was so much more than a writer and that maybe when people throw around the word �pedophile�, they�ve gotten the wrong end of the stick. Simulacrum. I can�t believe I�m only starting to understand it now. We represent what we represent and we are more than just the sum of our parts. We are whole and I am in love with (or not in love with) two completely different people and parts of myself and I am struggling with knowing which of these things I should really begin to believe in.