As we drive down dark backroads, I'm holding his hand very tightly; stretching my fingers as far as possible, trying to encompass his hand with my tiny one. I don't feel big enough to house the emotions running through me. I love him.
*
These days past have been going by so fast, running by me all holding hands together, it seems. My room is full of things I don't need, but insist on keeping. I see India as being an experience that starts now, in the preperation. In the leaving, the goodbyes, the going, the cleaning out of old things to make room for the new.
I keep running through a list of things I have and who should have them. I have to remind myself I'm not dying. It feels like I am, but that makes sense. What else could it be like ... going to such a different place where I will be challenged and amazed? And how completely unknown it is... death..
My suspicion is that the Kate Brown I have come to know will be gone soon. I think I'm going to lose something important soon. Everything has been painfully vivid to me recently. Thanksgiving was felt ten x's over .. the warmth of my family, the comfort of their presence, no matter what underlying turbulence there may be.
I've been trying to verbalize my feelings about leaving for weeks, but I can't seem to make the thought "I'm leaving my life here for 4 months and I see that as disappearing completely/as some sort of death" make sense ... sound a little more poetic.
If all goes well, I will be reading this over in a couple of months and smiling at how dramatic I can.. always had a flare for it.
I feel nothing but dissatisfaction with how this is coming across.

I've been living in the apartment as best I can while pretending to live alone. The girls are wonderful, I must be a poor companion. Someone will cough and I won't say anything most of the time. Someone will sneeze and I force myself to say bless you. I sit at the table with one and bemoan the fact that I can't sit on the couch by myself and knit and eat and watch and think.
There's never anything to watch I haven't seen before and thinking has an effect on my body ... crushed under too much gravity.

sense of security
unconditional love

Two things that we have been looking for and wanting since we were children.
In the backroom of Petco tonight, I was listening to NPR. A man was talking about this and how some people make good choices for meeting those needs, and others make poor ones. Also how if you don't feel unconditionally loved or safe as a child, you might look in the wrong places for those things later in life.
With a dog bone in my hand, I paused and thought about how I felt when I was little. And the truth is, everything felt conditional. If I messed up badly enough, Dad wouldn't be there anymore.
And safety... I remember how every now and then Dad would pack up his apartment and tell me he was moving soon, but he never did.. Not until I was 9 when he first left for Toronto to meet Heidi, then Florida to live with Heidi. No stability. I didn't trust myself to "behave" around him all of the time and I didn't trust him to love me anyway.


The one good thing about having been in therapy for x amount of the past months ... is that I'm realizing that not everything is my fault. And I don't have to make apologies or excuses for other peoples' behaviors.

however, coming to this realization doesn't stop others from being hurtful or me being deeply hurt by their actions.

I'm feeling too indignant and pissed off to finish.

saturday mornings

Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
-Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.


Such restless nights filled with apprehensions and allergies. Dangerous mix. One gives your mind an excuse to over work itself, and the other keeps your body awake.
I have a lot of things to give away. For a girl with no money, I have a lot of possessions. I grab things on sale and on whim.
It's good that I'm leaving. Most of me doesn't want to go at random times throughout the day, but that is good too. I am exiling myself, cutting myself out of my life here and pasting Me across the globe. Let's convince the egoist that life will go on without her, but feed her desire to finally be the one Missed instead of the one Missing.

A list, though is being made .. Stuff I have to deal with. Remove yourself from anything familiar and all you're left with is You.
I wonder if there are people who consciously go around saying to themselves "I am worth something" the way I walk around touting my non existent self worth. Or do the people who don't do what I do... just not think about it? No, they must not think about it because upon examining yourself thoroughly I don't believe anyone could walk away with it unscathed and trodden down.
These are the people who don't let jealousy sprouting from insecurities ruin relationships and morning drives. People who don't push people they love away.

I learned a long time ago that being aware of your faults doesn't mean anything if you are not willing to change them.

I want to know why I do things. Why I am the way I am when it comes to sex. Why I consume when I can't deal with my feelings; where that came from. Why I cry when I watch shows about kids in highschool. And why my heart lodges in my throat every time I open an envelope with my father's address on it... half hoping to find a letter, always relieved when I don't.

I spent yesterday with my family. Now that I'm older, now that we're all older, Daniel, Adam, Steven, and I can talk a little better and longer about things that we're interested in. Daniel is awkward around girls and I'm happy that I'm his cousin and,therefore, sexless in his eyes because he's so funny and I am pretty sure he was being himself yesterday.
I went to wake Adam up at 1 p.m. He always needs waking up and I was excited to see him as I climbed the stairs because I was looking forward to a sense of belonging. All four of the older cousins there (including me) are 19, 20, 21, and 24. It's okay for me to talk to them about veganism (aunt kim looked as if i stabbed her in the back when i told her i brought tofurkey), Wal-Mart, India, drugs, and the guaranteed discontentment with my place in life.
I tried to keep an eye on Mom, but decided not to when Uncle Joe asked me if we should try and keep her away from the dessert table. She won't listen, anyway. I saw her sneak into the room with the food when everyone had taken their pieces and slices. I kept thinking about how they see her. My family sees my mother as a child; but don't I? Don't I compare the line we hold between mother and daughter as the most abstract object you'll ever encounter?
Aunt Kim was hosting this year. A couple of years ago Daniel wrote an essay about his family and won an award. Everyone passed around the piece at Thanksgiving that year and coudln't bring themselves to talk about the subject matter. Aunt Kim drinks wine, apparently and a lot of it. Aunt Kim has stress and anxiety and maybe she isn't well. I kept an eye on her too yesterday, but here is a woman that I am not comfortable hugging randomly because I see her once or twice a year and she looks so fragile all the time, despite her weight, whatever its variance at the time.
Adam's room was littered with bottles of liquor, cartons of Camel Filters, cigarette butts, chairs, and bowls. I sat in one of the chairs and he sat up in his bed, a sleeping bag covering him up to his chest. I waited outside his room while he got dressed and went downstairs. Uncle Danny's property holds a little house that serves as a place for Adam and Daniel to stay. Their fridge had stuffing for the dinner, two bottles of beer, and probably some other indiscernable object. A couple of hours later, when Arran and Gavin (the younger cousins representing the 3-6) age group, knocked on Adam's door as we were hiding out there, we had to scramble to clean up the bowls of butts, parahenalia, and alcohol. All I can say is too bad I wasn't consuming any of that stuff. It may have helped.

Paul told me that he hung up the phone the second he heard his new doctor was a woman. My grandmother laughed about how her husband is a chauvinist pig. Ha ha.
Daniel and I tried to make Arran and Gavin play "cemetery" so they'd be quiet, but instead they started fighting without yelling and Arran got an open handed slap across the face.
I wandered around the new house and got lost, stepped over a dead mouse in the attic.
Adam told me that the congregation of the church his parents attend just fired its pastor because he saw to it that some black members of the church were uncomfortable and they were. And they left.

I definitely remember moments yesterday where I consciously thought to myself "I am happy and I love my family and all of their sadness, laughter, and tension."

Thanksgiving. What are you thankful for? And don't I ask myself that question every day? This is mainly a reason for my family to get together, and I suppose I should appreciate the day for that.
Mom is probably picking me up today and I'm nervous about it, but stuck. I'm usually stuck. I suppose that's the appeal of leaving; literally getting yourself out of an environment that has become so routine.
My only goal for today is to go for a run. Ten minutes ago my goal was to eat a whole loaf cake and then go for a run. I'll settle for half and wait until I get home to be mobile like that.
I haven't been to the gym in three days now and it's getting to me. I couldn't stop comparing myself/berating myself/yelling at myself for different reasons last night.

D says he has something for me at his house. I think he either made it for me or bought it for me. I feel bad because I've been putting off making his present. I think I've been doing that because that means I'm not leaving and I won't have to think about making something for him that I want him to keep in his possession until I see him again. It's as if I love him too much to make him a present. If I wrote more sentences on the matter I'm sure it'd make sense, but I'm not there right now.

cake. numb. promises to do better later.
good forecast.

I slept for two hours this eveinging, trying to get rid of a headache that had been raking my brain over all day. Bassil called while I was sleeping and it woke me up and when I saw that it was him I felt bad because he moved away a long time ago and we hadn't been able to get in touch since he left which was about six years ago. So we hadn't kept in touch until this summer, when he got in touch with me. He's in Texas now and not Syria, but I don't know what to say to him when we talk because I feel as if he is so lonely and his desparity to find friends from long ago using long distance sinks into his conversation and runs its way through the wires to me and when I hang up I feel covered in slimy sadness.. Thick and I can't walk. And I talk to him and I feel displaced as if my life was just as turned around at fifteen as his was.
I woke up and the headache wasn't as bad and I was glad to have lost three hours of my life to sleep. Hours I wasn't getting back, but I'm ready to surrender them these days.

I'm sitting at my desk and I think I am stuck here. Only my fingers moving to type. I can tell I don't have an expression on my face, but my stomach is in knots. Typical for a Monday morning of a Monday that includes a paper, a presentation, and an India meeting.

Why is it second nature to think that whenever he says "I hate Jersey" "I don't like concrete things" ...

That he's saying he hates me and then that we're anything but something solid.

My skin is translucent, not thick at all. And it's November 21st, 2005 .. I am 20 years old and I still haven't learned the trick of hearing what people say and not what my brain twists it in to.

But, there ... the last part. At least I'm recognizing it now.

Sense of communal living. I had to approach Kat today and somehow get across that I feel as if it's every woman for herself here in the apartment. And that in itself was very non communal of me. I was telling her and speaking as if she had to have the solution. She looked at me as if she didn't know what I wanted her to say. Did I want her to even have a solution? I definitely went into that stiuation thinking something would come out of it. All I'm left with is "I would like you to clean more" and "Well, I hate communicating in post-its"
I don't think I'd care if I wasn't faced with the fact that in two months I'll be living with ten other people and having to make it work. And that I always feel as if I have to be the great crusader .. the mature one who brings things up first.

We had potluck tonight, though. And after talking with Kat about "community" in the apartment and her telling me I need to clean more .. I found it somewhat appropriate that everyone left and I am cleaning by myself. So someone should have been considerate of the girl standing alone at the counter, but my question is always ...
How much can you think of other people before you forget to think about yourself? And if you're always making such an effort to be going out of your way because you have this thing you have to prove .. that you're fair minded, an egalitarian, .. That you're not all the people you hate .. if you're always trying to prove that .. how much of what you say is really you? Or is it just you trying not to be something you hate and still being something you aren't? I'll say it.. that a lot of my actions are consceince decisions I make to not be someone else.
It's easier to be a doormat because then no one looks twice at you. It's easy to be a woman and a doormat because you've been socialized that way and it's comfortable. I am comfortable tellling everyone to leave and not worry about me and have a good time.. The words fit me like old shoes.. And I keep patching up these holes. Whatever .. shitty metaphor, but sometimes I do work very hard to not see the truth in my actions / where they come from.. or the negative impact my actions have on me.

.. i have not had a cigarette in two months and when i watch people smoking on tv it's like porn.

the first

Since everything seems so temporary right now, maybe I've created this blog in an attempt to have something I know can be with me in India. It will be waiting for me when I get there, actually; A collection of memories starting from a month before I left all compiled with dates and emoticons if I feel like it.
.. So I can read about my mother, D, my room, and my friends who are like family ... and have them without holding.