foodforthewolves.

In Dungeon Siege III, I play Anjali.

She has locks of golden flame, and she can set her foes on fire with a flick of her wrist.

I’d give up 98% of the world to be her.

On the surface, everything with him is fine. On the way to the wedding we talked. He doesn’t want out. He said he’s done a long distance relationship before and that it sucked. But he wants to give this thing a shot, for his own sake. It should have made me feel better. So should have dancing with him at the reception, and the way he let me hold his hand on the train ride back, and the fantastic sex we had that night. All of it should have made me so fucking happy. But I’m not. I’m just even more scared that he’s regretting his decision, that he’s thinking about other girls, that he’s deliberately ignoring my texts, because that’s certainly how it feels like right now. I think I’m falling in love, here. And there’s a part of me that is getting harder and harder to ignore, a part that is saying, ‘end this.’ Because I’ve forgotten that one of my relationships, my last very serious one, ended up being long distance. Chris eventually went back to Michigan while I was still doing my thing last year. I remember he came and saw me and nonchalantly told me he had had a threesome at Western Michigan University. Our relationship didn’t last much longer after that. But this was the guy who fucked with my emotions so much that I got sick, and was incapable of eating meat for about a month. I got so anxious that my body literally stopped producing stomach acid, and I couldn’t break down certain foods. I would throw up, every time. That has been my experience with love and long distance. So…maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that part of me wants to run so badly. Abandon this now, because it’s going to be tougher than I remembered, tougher than I realized, and I’m just not sure it’s worth it to me. I was so in love with Chris, and in the end I threw him out of my apartment because I just couldn’t take the fear anymore. But at the same time…if this is what I’m starting to think it is…if this is me falling, really falling, then isn’t it worth the risk? The going gets tough, and I want to split? That’s what I always do. And I don’t want to do that anymore. But I can’t live with this awful feeling in my stomach either. I can’t be physically here, with my mind miles away. I have a fortune cookie message taped to my mirror. It says, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” Well, I have always run. And I have always wound up alone. I don’t want to be alone, but I don’t want to do a long distance relationship if I perpetually feel like this. I don’t want a long distance relationship, but I really really really want him. I don’t know what to do. Please help me.

I don’t think any one place sees more of my emotions than my shower. There’s something comforting about the ugly peach-ish walls, the boiling water. When you put your face right into the spout you can no longer tell the difference between tears and water. It’s like hiding it, even though in there you don’t have to.

Really, you ought not to hide it anywhere, but I do. It’s not even a conscious thought anymore. It’s like flipping on a light in a room. You touch that switch, and before your hand is even off the lever, yellow is pouring down from the ceiling. It’s automatic, and lately, has done me more harm than good. What if I want to show how I feel, i.e., like a fucking train wreck. Like a whirlwind of confusion and emotion that I can’t yet sort out into coherent sentences. So when my Father looks at me, or my Mother, or my Brother and they ask how my weekend is, all I can do is shrug. Say it was good. Pretend like I’m not utterly falling to pieces.

And for what, anyway? Because I’m hyper-sensitive and I think too god damn much? Because after he brought it up, I finally remembered that I have done a long distance relationship. Chris moved back to Michigan eventually. The next time he visited me, I made us dinner. He told me that he had had a threesome over chicken fajitas. That has been my experience of love and long distance. No wonder I tried to forget. But they are not the same, and I know this. But I sit by my text-less phone, ignoring the concerned stares of my family, thinking about the first time I saw him. He was wearing plaid then, which comes as no surprise now. I was at a party for a friend of a friend’s, and I hardly knew anybody. He stood, not drinking, arms folded by a recliner chair and I wanted him immediately. Calendar days elude me, but I’m fairly sure that was two years ago. Now he may be mine. I think. Yes? I think? My heart races and I have no inclination to eat because, let’s just face it, I am fucking terrified. I’m terrified of being too clingy, terrified of being too distant. I’m terrified of being too mean, of saying things he may take more harshly than I intend, but also terrified of not saying what’s on my mind, in a way hiding what makes me me. All of these things are so tightly wrapped in my head as I sit there quietly, stoic. I feel like I’m crazy. And it’s all because I’ve cared so fucking much for this guy since February that I fear I will fuck it all up.

I could fuck it all up.

thatawkwardmoment:

when the guy who discovered milk realizes he has to explain how he found it.

That’s its name. The bane of my writerly existence. Well, at least, of my writerly existence thus far.

I went over it with Meno this afternoon. I sat in a rolly chair in his office, knowing that it was the last Fiction conference of my life at Columbia College, and I STILL royally suck at bracketing.

But for now, that’s neither here nor there. My main concern is this novel in progress that I can’t seem to do away with. I have sat for over a year, watching the evolution of this story, as if I were watching a child grow up. Antoinette literally grew up before my eyes, first in that unexpected yet charming story of a father, pushing his toddler daughter around in her exer-saucer, listening to Smoke On the Water. Man, I had no idea what that story meant—or what it would eventually be.

Now she is eighteen, and fighting for all hell to be taken seriously. She’s trying to find perhaps just one person that will treat her as a rational human being. Besides her father, a former greaser in his glory days, and her best friend, Dani, who winds up pregnant, battling between their feminist fundamentals, and a fleeting, yet powerful feeling that she’d be willing to sacrifice her own for her child’s. There’s a rally, a rebellion, a boy in Michael Jackson leather.

Damn it all, every synopsis I attempt sounds like some tv guide description for a Lifetime movie, but I swear it isn’t. It’s about equality, human rights, and the human right to fuck up every now and again—which Antoinette and Dani seem capable of doing over and over and over. It’s a coming of age story. What’s worse is that its a “comical” one. Countless times I have wanted to put it on the shelf with a shrug, not quite able to be rid of that ever pressing feeling as though I have somehow outgrown it. I have other ideas, far better ones. Ones that question reality, ones that question the purpose of human existence. They are surreal and philosophical, but I can’t manage to get beyond this seemingly simplistic question that two punks in the year of 1985 are asking themselves over high school porcelain sinks: what do we do now?

I’ve written eighty pages in third person. Then I changed my mind, and wrote eighty pages in first person. Now I realize that I should have kept with third person, but the story has evolved so much that my original draft is like a skeleton. Sacha, and Andrea, and Scott. Names with nuances, and fingerprints, and feelings, people that have sprung from the imaginative soil, like fucking Gerber daisies. And I’m here, knotting up my fingers in my hair, wondering if it will ever be finished. If it will ever be anything worthy of the thought, of the intention, behind it. If this story is just a bunny hill, on a trail full of mountains.

Haha…ahh, it’s like that movie Inception. It’s amazing what an idea can do, if you let it. I am a writer. When I was seven, I would make fake news articles on notebook paper, stapling the pieces and handing them out to my family. When I was ten I began drawing comics, tales of skateboarding and blink 182. At twelve I began my first novel—science fiction, hand written in a spiral bound that I still have in my closet, crinkled and yellowed with age. Through girl scouts, and soccer, and drum set lessons, through middle school, and high school, and college, everything else I have given up, lost interest in. Some, it’s true, I would love to take back, but writing was something I never considered sacrificing, because it was the only thing that could still capture my interest.

I am twenty-one, now, and on my fourth and final year of earning a degree in creative writing. And yet, and YET…one idea, one character, one mud fight, one meager plot that I myself have conjured, makes me question every minute, every dollar given over to this. It’s maddening, this process! No fucking wonder so many great writers took to drinking, because this solitary, exclusively imaginary mindfuck that we manifest rules our lives. Between two shitty drafts, between the baby then, and the woman now, between the spaces of punctuation marks, I question the purpose of my life. I question this gruesome, introverted path I have chosen for myself, and will always wonder if I simply am just not good enough. If I was simply just meant to do something else with my life.

But after all of that, I will keep writing.

Because I can’t come up with a better idea.

thatawkwardmoment:

when your friend in a wheelchair at your niece’s bday party also wants to play musical chairs and your niece shouts out, “NO! He’s going to win EVERYTIME!”

(Source: moderndream)