three three three (this is an attempt at salvation)

At the temple in the woods, they call this "laying it all out on the table":

My skin is bubbling, there are so many things going on underneath it.
Most skins crawl. Mine bubbles. I’m just different, I guess, but I’ll get to that later. I can feel it happening too, getting worse because it goes untouched, just accumulating under there.
Sometimes, my thoughts burst white on the surface, splattering up close against mirrors or rubbing off on a select few people’s fingers. Yea, I let lovers and best friends and supposed best friends and my brother pop my zits sometimes. What are you going to do about it?
So there are lots of things on my body and in it that get touched. Things like: my neuroses, my hang-ups, my achievements, my trophies, my jewelry, my shoulders. But there are lots of things inside that don’t get so much as stroked by anyone, least of all by me. Weird, isn’t it? You’d think that someone as insightful, solitary, and “deep” as the person I seem to be would know her own ins and outs.
My big secret?
I don’t.
The most I know is what everyone else who looks at me knows, as though my eyes are mirrors reflecting my own self back at me as I go. I feel my lower lip getting pulled down. I wonder if that’s a sign that I’m getting somewhere.
I tend to have romantic notions about small things holding meaning. I’m pretty sure someone else pointed that out to me. I forget who it was that found it first, but it was phrased something like: “you have weird ideas about things sometimes.”
Anyways, I have this current romantic notion that this vacation is supposed to mean something, or rather, that it’s supposed to hold meaning, as though meaning is a tiny little kitten you could cup between your hands and coo at softly. But this is so abstract I can’t even stand it. Can’t stand on it. Can’t poke it with a stick. Can’t so much as make it out in the snow. That must mean it’s white. Or not. I don’t know. I’m silly about things sometimes. You should know that by now.
I wish I had paid more attention to grammar in elementary school. It’s not the kind of thing they teach you at this age, but I really don’t know anything about verb tenses. Did it happen, is it happening, will it happen? Couldn’t tell you. It seems to me that the older you get, the more you have to teach things to yourself. As you get older, more and more people let go of your hands in one way or another, and it becomes your job to hang on to them. What I’m trying to say is that growing up is hard. It’s a lot of grasping and gasping and taking initiative and discerning the different steps of an operation and executing them as beautifully as you can manage. It knows when to walk away and when to step forward, when to stand still and when to burst into movement. It’s like dancing, I guess. But I always thought I was a good dancer.
It’s also like baking a cake. I was never much of a baker, but I’m sure I could be if I wanted to bad enough. The thing is though, I want to be at the stage where I’m just waiting for my cake to come out of the oven instead of scrambling frantically for all the ingredients I’m not even sure I have.
I’m a shitty writer who gets a few good ideas once in a while. I say I want a typewriter, but I’d probably just fuck that up. I’m no good at sticking to things.
I almost want to stop sticking to you. You make my life complicated in a way I’ve never seen before. You have me upside down and I’m not sure who demanded the handstand: me, you, or the universe. All I know is that I’m here, blood rushing to my head, and I don’t know what to do next. I romanticize my old self a lot, and this is one of those times I want to think that I knew everything back then and lost my knack for understanding the world and my place in it.
I just realized that I will probably want to send this to you. What is up with that? Why do I feel the need to let everyone in on my journals? Is it because I feel no real attachment to my life, thoughts, secrets? Is it because I want to grab attention in a most unconventional manner? Is it because words harden like marbles in my mouth and the only way I know how to shoot them is when I put pen to paper? And I even fail at that most of the time, by my own rigorous standards. I wonder where all these rules of mine came from.
You know how there are those people whose moral compasses are always working? The kinds of people that exist in books and movies, who always know to save their families and friends first, who always say the right lines, who wear the right hairstyle with the even righter dress, who run the railroad with an iron desire because oh, they know what they need to do, and it is always the rightest thing because it came from inside? Fuck those people. I put them on pedestals and then I jab myself with self-doubt, because I don’t have a compass inside me and I’m trying my goddamn hardest to built one out of my organs.
It might be that I love you, and I love you because to me, you have one of those perpetually functional moral compasses inside you. I like it when you tell me what to do because most of the time, I believe it, and when I don’t, I feel safe arguing with you because if your arrow is pointing to me, than there must be something about me that’s right too. Wow. That’s why I love you, sesame. That’s why I feel this air-light desire for you to be around me forever. Because you make me feel right.
It don’t feel right, it don’t feel right, it don’t feel it don’t feel it don’t feel it … come on. That’s a roots reference. What is my thing with hip-hop? Now there’s an interesting one to dissect. I am scared shitless of being caged in to my status and my lifestyle, but I’m already so damaged from being sheltered that I get paralyzed my politeness and feel all funny inside when I walk by a homeless man or a black guy with a bandana hanging from his pocket. I think I’m so high and mighty, so out to do good, and I don’t even know why. I love to dance. I love to move in my mind, love to picture the stage and the position changes and the coupling and the energy between people. Hip-hop lets me do that. Maybe under all my layers, I really am black. I really am African. I wish the whole world could get on the same page about one goddamn thing. A good thing, too, not just any old notion. Like that we can all love each other in a sexual or non-sexual way, regardless of any arbitrary factor. That everyone has families who they love for better or worse. That our skin is fragile, and the color of it is never really our choice.
I wish I didn’t get so nervous about loving people. I wish I didn’t get so fucking sweet and chipper and politically correct around people I want to like me. I wish I could be me at all costs, me no holds barred, me the bitch the snoot the smart-ass the goody two shoes the Jew the upper middle class the Canadian the one the only the prophecy the grain of salt the dirt the earth the compass inside you who tells you what to do because it’s right the journalist who actually has a grip on what she’s doing and a notion of how to go about doing it.
I think I’m done for right now. This was nice. I might get on that typewriter, right after I get on that camera, right after I figure out why it is I notice the things I do and then use them as tools to dissect my own empty being. … I’m going to eat a cookie.

two two two.

christmas has already happened there.
it was punctuated by the rustle of gift wrap opening and lots of goodbye hugs.