2009-11-05 / 6:40 p.m.

I am twenty years old and I live with my parents and they're both very angry people, and I live with my brother and he's got a girlfriend that was once my best friend, only she broke my spirit, and now she's breaking his and I work a day here and there in a post office in a village for an old woman and it's nice and it's easy and it's stress free and the customers actually care who I am and remember my name and the things I tell them.

I am slowly slowly slowly working on a photography portfolio to try to get back into college next year. The ultimate goal is a photography degree course and I don't know how I'm going to go about making all four years without dropping out, but this is the way things are going to have to be. I keep telling myself over and over that I can do it. I know that I can. I know it. Why do I question myself?

I have been with the same boy, or man, since I was seventeen. That makes it just about three years now. I'd like to say that he's the best thing that's ever happened to me with conviction, and true, he is in some ways. Without him, I probably would've died just two years ago. He literally saved my life, and for that, I am forever thankful.

Times are tough now, and days are long, and last Hallowe'en night, I ran up a hill that was way too steep to even think about, and it rained and it rained and it rained and he followed me, breathless and drunk, shouting and shouting and shouting and he was so goddamn angry and all I could do was cry. I cried and I cried. I didn't just sob. I wailed.

His father died when he was just eight years old and his mother looked after him and his younger brother and sister, only now she's dying because she's got a brain tumor the size of a large grapefruit. She went to the doctor's with headaches all the time, and they all said that it was just a migraine. Go rest, Maria. Close the curtains. Lie down. Rest.

My boyfriend - he's angry, you know. He tries, he does try, but I can see into his soul and he is sad and broken and he is angry with his life. I try to help, but I don't know what to say, and I can't think of any one thing that I can do to help anymore, and I feel sad, so fucking sad and so fucking heartbroken and stuck. Man I'm so fucking stuck and so far in and I love this boy but I just can't do this and I find refuge in the words of other friends and I think I'm falling in love with certain things and certain ways and I know that it's not good for me, but man, I just don't know what to do anymore, and all I can think about is the fact that time is the one thing that we can never retrieve. I've been told that I should be selfish, just this once, but I can't, goddamnit, I can't because I'm so bloody caught up in this stupid, sad world that I can't even express myself and all I can do is fall in and out of love with different people and cry myself to sleep at night because I'm not giving up on myself this time, I just need strength and faith and promise and I'm looking for it hard, harder than I ever have, only I'm looking in all the wrong places, and this time I'm wasting with all this looking, I'm never gonna get it back, never never never and I'm scared. I'm really, really scared.