Free writing:

The images from the monitor reflect off of your face making you look like a rainbow against the darkness of your bedroom and I ask "Why?"

It isn't even a question of "Why did you leave me?" it is more of a question of "Why did you stay so long?". I know our relationship was always a fantasy to begin with but at some point something real must have passed between us. It simply must have.

It is days like today that I wished that I still smoked. The bit of pain wakes me up followed by a surge of nicotine dream relief and of course, the ritual which is all we ever really had, isn't it?

I should have known things were going wrong when we would stay up all night chatting over IM about Atlantis. You would pull out book after book to quote at me about how Atlantis was real and how the psychic energy from there was making you into something more than you are into something you thought you were suppose to be and I kept telling you that I didn't believe and asking you why you believed in Atlantis and you would just read another passage to me about how wonderful a place it was and all I could think was how well you adjusted from Tennessee to California but I kept my mouth shut. That is one thing I've learned over the years. Keep quiet, don't loan out your CDs and everything will be all right.

I want to ask for advice, to tell my friends about you but that would only expose me as a hypocrite and I've spent so long trying to carve out some credibility but it is just too hard but that is what you get when you sign on for a project like this. It is just too hard. So I keep quiet and make sure not to lend you anything because I never know when one of us will cut and run but I expected that it would be me and hey everyone is wrong sometimes.

You let me watch your webcam as you sell yourself or the fantasy of you to strangers every night and I can't stand it but what can I say? Have I been any better? Was I any different? Someday I expect that you will be talking to one of them about Atlantis if you aren't already.

I can't think of anything to say and you get bored of waiting and the last thing I see is your arm reaching over to turn off your cam and then darkness.

I don't really know what the monkeys in my template are all about anymore. What did I have in mind? When I first put them up there I thought they were funny and cute. Now I feel like they are mocking me. Am I losing my mind? I know that jpgs and animated gifs are incapable of mocking anyone and even if they could, why would they single me out for mockery? Be honest.

From the How Lame Am I? Dept:

I hate it when people I know become successful. I know it sounds like a Morrissey song, but it is true. In actual fact, I think The Smiths were pretty darn cool, but that is beside the point. The point is that someone I knew from a long while back and always made fun of has in fact managed to put together a bit of a career and I look at myself and I see that I secretly hope that she is either unhappy, humorless or stuck-up and I've gotten reports that she is none of these things. And I still sit in my cubicle pretending to work for nine hours a day.

An image I found from a LiveJournal Image Finder Script:

I like this one because it has a desolate quality to it.

For some reason I am always fascinated by isolated on lonely places. What do people do there? Are their lives desolate and lonely or do they create loving communities? Or does TV make all of that irrelevant?

I think the first time I felt depressed, not just sad, but real "anxiously staring into the abyss" kind of depressed, involved an image of isolation. I must have been about 6 (yeah, we start young in my family) and my parents, my brother and I were on our family Summer vacation to Cape Cod. I had gotten an ear infection and wasn't feeling well enough to go out and my mom was exhausted so Joel and my dad go to the beach or something and my mom gives me some lunch in the motel room and she lies down to take a nap. I remember staring out the back window of the motel room and all I could see was grass (that rough kind you don't want to walk through with flip flops on) and sand for yards and yards until there was a tree line which blocked of any further view. In the middle of this little field of nothing was what I recall to be an electrical substation which hummed away. I remember staring at that and wondering how lonely it would be to live here as a kid and have this be my playground and I felt like that loneliness crept inside of me but I just kept staring because as awful as that feeling was it was also fascinating.

When I was a kid sometimes my parents would drive me along this stretch of highway where we would pass this big old office building which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. It was surrounded by trees and seemed to be so lonely. I couldn't help but think that the people who worked there must be terribly unhappy since they seemed so far away from everybody.

It wasn't that I was some sort of super social kid. I could spend hours alone in my room playing with my Star Wars figures and G. I. Joes. I could get so wrapped up in them that my mother could shout for me to come down for dinner for twenty minutes and I just wouldn't hear her. But always there was this sense, this knowledge that I could go downstairs or around the block and find people, as if being around people was some kind of magic talisman against depression. That illusion dissipated when I went to NYU. If one of the most crowded cities in the world could still depress me, then it wasn't about how many people were around at all.

These two memories seem to be the genesis of my decision to always live in the city. Around High School I made this decision and now I am starting to re-evaluate that decision. The thing that has cause this change of heart is that now I can see a certain joy in aloneness that isn't necessarily loneliness. That and welbutrin combined with depakote. One or both of those things seems to have changed my feelings about this.