I've been drinking more diet soda than usual. And constantly plotting how I can drop 10 or more pounds to get down to my destructive relationship pre-medicated and constantly ill state. Those things aren't really related. I never drink Earl Grey tea on Sunday mornings, anymore. Or eat meat. I'm finding it hard to write. About anything. To do my work or put words here. Nothing seems to make sense anymore. Not the jargon that used to fly out of my head late nights or the self-reflective letters of love I used to construct without effort and mail away for mornings alone. With you. Sure, I still drink a lot. I still get fucked up and long to smoke cigarettes on the porch after everyone else has gone to bed. But I'm not unhappy. And when I go to bed, I'm never alone. And when I have something to say -- there's always someone to hear me. My old boyfriend used to always tell me, and he honestly believes, that people have to be alone--truly alone--in order to sort out their thoughts and to understand themselves completely. That anything done seriously for the mind and soul can only be done alone. I think that's a load. A lie that people who like being on their own tell themselves so they don't end up feeling bad about their own desire for alienation. Or feeling responsible for making other people in their lives feel bad by turning them into chronic outsiders. Journeys of growth and development whether spiritual or of the relationship kind are always at the same time individual and communal. We are influenced by others in thoughts or deeds or emotions and in turn we impress ourselves against others. That slow interchange of experience is what makes continual change even possible. Nothing ever really happens in isolation. Nothing, maybe, except habitual hiding from being responsible for yourself at every moment. And in honesty, we all have trouble with that. Time to time. And I still want to make words pretty. To make them slither into your ear like wind across flat spaces in Fall. But they're never coming out that way. All clunk and no funk. I'm wearing my boyfriend's jeans right now. Which are baggy and cinched up at the waist by a belt. He's in the shower getting ready to head to the gym. Where I've decided that now, since it's late, I can't go. Because I still haven't gotten any work done. No words on the page. Nothing read or researched. Even for the hours I wasted crying and sleeping this weekend. There's not one thought to turn into something interesting. I hate diet soda. And showering. And this time of day when the sun blares into my eyes. I have over-due library books on loan from another library in another state where no one probably wants to look at the stupid thing, anyway. I'm wearing a black shirt that's a small, but is still slightly too big for me so I usually wear it on the weekends when I'm in the house just working. And wearing baggy pants and drinking caffeinated beverages. And listening to my mate react to the football game he's watching in the living room where we just had sex on the floor. I'm not sure who's winning. Thank christ I did the laundry yesterday. The way things move is so weird. Before, I never even drank soda.