The old fatigue headache's back. Honestly, it's starting to feel like an old friend. Sometimes I think mornings at work just wouldn't be the same without that hollow throb behind my eyes. I spent about fifteen minutes lying in bed this morning, trying to decide if I should stay home or not.
I shouldn't have stayed up so late to talk to C--. I knew when I signed off at 12:37 that I was looking at a bad morning. It's just so unusual for him to be online when I am, and he was actually talking to me, not just being sarcastic and distant.
My mother and I were waiting for the metro at The Pentagon this morning, when this guy just casually comes to stand in front of us at the station. My mother made some comment under her breath about assholes like him, and in typical Agent Skatter fashion, I said, "Well, all you have to do is lift one foot up and use it to push him onto the tracks."
Apparently, I said it loudly enough for him to hear, because he turned around and glared at me.
I didn't think anything of it, and promptly forgot the whole situation, until I got on the elevator at work. Just my luck, the guy from the metro station was the only other person on the elevator with me. I was expecting more glares--what I got was somehow worse. He just smiled at me, asked me how I was doing, and when he got off, told me to have a good day. I wasn't sure if I felt like sinking into the floor or bursting into peal after peal of embarrassed giggles. It was one of those things where he knew that I knew that he knew that I was the one who'd suggested pushing him onto the tracks. Or maybe I'm making too much of it, and he was just being friendly.I'm starting to get very worried about my relationship with Dirk. Sometimes, when I'm looking at him, I'll remember all the shit I went through before we dated, waiting forever for him to make up his mind, living from pill to pill with no-one knowing any better. I'll remember his insistence on remaining friends with Krisco, because it was "important". I remember him not wanting to tell her that we were dating, because he was afraid she'd hurt herself. I remember the night he fucking ditched me because she was freaking out in his room and I slashed my arm open with my car keys. My car keys. Sometimes I just want to slam my fist into his face over and over and over again, so he can get a glimpse of how it felt to be me in 1997. Sometimes I want to hook my fingers under the skin of his face on the left side, and slowly pull it off, like a mask.
Talking to C-- makes me realize how I feel. I pretend to myself that I'm normal, and I start to believe it. It's not normal to want to hurt your boyfriend. It's not normal to stay angry with him for things that happened months ago, a lifetime ago. Every time I look at the scars on my arm (when you slash yourself open with car keys, you're not making a cut, you're ripping away skin. The scars are long shallow indentions of pink), it opens all the wounds fresh, as if it just happened yesterday. Dirk's already apologized, numerous times, for that hell before January, for the suffocation time while I waited. I can't forgive him.
What's wrong with me? Why can't I put it in the past? Why didn't I say anything at the time? It's a pattern with me. The first few months of a relationship, I'll take just about anything, and not say a word. When I finally find my voice, and let the guy know how I feel about certain things, the damage is already done. He's already fucked up so badly that I can't forget it, and I never learned how to forgive. Luckily, I started speaking up pretty early on with Dirk. Maybe three months into the relationship. One of the things that Ken told me, in the night hours when he'd ambush me in the computer room, was that I'd constantly made him feel guilty for things he'd done in the past. I'm trying not to do that with Dirk. I only mention it when the urge to hurt him becomes overwhelming, or I've started crying and he wants to know why.
See, I didn't dwell on stuff like this before I talked to C--. He wakes up the bad parts of my psyche, the parts that I usually rewire my brain around so I don't trip over them. Maybe it's because he never tries to compensate for his bad qualities, for his sociopathic tendencies. And we've grown close enough that he feels comfortable enough to describe who he wants to see dead, and how he wants to kill them. I do the same. If I get too enthusiastic about blood and gore and fantasies about hurting people, Dirk starts to worry. C-- doesn't. He encourages me.
Okay, order of the next few days is to work on forgetting about all the shit from the past. It's not helpful. I'm worried because it doesn't take very much to make me mad at him these days, and I seem to be lashing out at him all the time. In return, he's been getting angry (seriously angry) at me more often. It's stress, I know it's stress, and I don't need to dwell on everything that happened in the beginning of our relationship and before we dated. It's just hard sometimes, when the lone scar on the back of my hand (Ken used to tell me I had beautiful hands) catches my eye.
I'm working on setting up the web ring. Meanwhile, please Check out Dirk's site. Unless you have a problem with profanity. The best thing on there is under GSFU (my current band). There's a list of band names that were discarded in favor of GSFU.
I've given up on finding something worthwhile to read for free. I'm reading a trashy romance novel (re-reading, at this point) where a full quarter of the book is nothing but sex scenes.
I meant to put this in yesterday, but I forgot (remember, I was distracted). I had the oddest/gross dream yesterday morning, during my nap.
I was on a ship from the 18th century, except much larger than those vessels had been. I was male, with shoulder-length red/gold hair. The dream began innocently enough: I was on a store on the ship (don't ask, I don't know either) and saw a girl about to purchase a knife that I knew by experience was mainly decorative. It wouldn't hold an edge for very long.
I started making fun of her choice, and she retorted, "I'll take any weapon I get. That priest had me in his torture chamber, and it was only by the grace of (insert appropriate egyptian god/goddess here) that I escaped."
In one of those flashes of insight that you can only have in dreams, I realized she was talking about the priest who was in charge of our ship. He required medicines that were made of human body parts to stay healthy, and would send his henchmen (acolytes) to fetch people from their rooms at night. Everyone knew it was happening, but pretended to see nothing, for fear they'd be next.
He'd tried to kill me for his medicines, since my cabin had been across the corridor from the vast room he used to kill people, but my mother had raised such an outcry when I was captured that the priest had killed her, and released me for fear of killing too many people at once. I'd spent the time since then hidden on the ship, praying we'd reach land before he ran out of passengers to kill.
I showed the girl my hiding place, down in the bottom of the ship. We hid for days, and once when we came up, we saw the priest had gotten to the first mate. Instead of outright killing him, however, he'd cut off his buttocks and removed a part of his colon tract. The first mate's pants were soaked with blood. He was philisophical about this, saying "If he keeps this up, there soon won't be anyone left to sail the ship," as he sat on the railing and bled.
I had a pet dragon in this dream. It shared a lot of characteristics with a moray eel: it was slimy, and the head was kind of horse-shaped. It had wings and was green, though. Anyway, the dragon got fed up with the priest killing everyone, and started spitting this black tarlike substance over everyone on the ship, putting them in suspended animation. The last thing I saw was the stuff covering my vision. Then an announcer's voice boomed in my head, "Thanks to his dragon, the author of this story has lived for hundreds of years...."And I bet you thought your dreams were weird.
Well, that used to be the end of the entry, but then more stuff happened. That'll teach me to write my entries so early in the day, huh?
On my way to the metro, I passed this man who was panhandling, with an arrow saying "please help", that he'd point at his paper cup whenever someone passed by. He's always smiling, no matter the weather. Today, he was also holding his cup upside down, demonstrating that there was nothing in it. I felt bad, since I pass this guy every day and just smile at him and say hi (what, me, heart of cement?). So, I gave him my last dollar. I figured he needed to eat more than I need a car.
When I was telling Dirk about this later in the car, he told me something he'd heard, that had been a major inspiration for him, "The only thing we take with us when we die is what we left behind". I took that literally, and informed Dirk that we'd be taking an awful lot of poop (feces, for the non-laymen) with us if that was the case. As well as gallons of urine, pounds of shed skin cells and hair. I then wondered if we would be required to wear all this stuff in the afterlife. If so, it would be rather gelatinous and gross.
I was laughing so hard I thought I'd wet myself. Dirk didn't find it nearly as funny. I wonder why?
Seriously, though, I didn't mean to make fun of his inspiration. I just did my usual thing, and completely misinterpreted it on purpose. We also discussed the possibility of recycling food...but we'll leave that ground untrodden.
As a special bright note for the day, my mother's staying home from work tomorrow. Please kill me.