freezing bedroom, warmer heart, old words

My apartment has a heat problem. Which is to say, we do not control the heat, and it's a problem. When you're walking around in a bra and boxers and fanning yourself with your homework in mid-November, something is wrong with your heat. My room is the hottest. To deal with it, I have taken to opening the window and putting the fan in front of it, directing the freezing night air straight onto my bed and legitimizing my comforter.

Except apparently they've recently realized that 90 degrees might be overdoing it and scaled it back to what feels like a comfortably goosebumpy 52. I took a nap earlier and left the window open and fan on--now my bedroom is an icebox. I write from inside my hoodie, from inside my nest of blankets.

I don't want to write much tonight because a) I have my IS final tomorrow morning, b) I'm on the last chapter of The Origin of Humankind and let me tell you, things are really getting intense, and c) I want to participate in that archaic custom of Sleep.

I little while ago, for the first time, I went back and looked at all the "drafts" in my blog--the stuff I wrote and didn't "publish" for whatever reason (discomfort, unfinished). It's always strange and comforting to read something I don't remember writing, because I tend to react in a "I so know what you mean" sort of way, like I just met someone who really gets me. Which is really what a person should be to herself, I think.

Here's one.

December 6, 2006--

I, like a fool, like a child, never give up hope.

3AM and what helps when I feel like I will certainly throw up is a cold cloth over my heart, to slow it down. Really, that should be indication enough. Is it the sickness that comes first, or the tailspin of thoughts down into some truly ridiculous psychological territory? Each encourages the other, and I get into this unhealthy mindstate, sort of everything pent-up being allowed to play and multiply, until I'd do almost anything to get myself to relax. I understand the mind-body connection, Love in the Time of Cholera, those desperate early morning actions that completely betray every rational thought a person has. Phone calls, plane tickets, a climactic obliteration of pride and self-respect, a surge of primal need.

It isn't sane... everything you can say adds up to nothing. What if it happened, if you got the person's attention? Then what? Words can't possibly explain it. It's all you, a feeling dancing in your mind, a fantastic vent of frustration and anger and longing all sort of culminating in something incommunicable. Because it is fundamentally not grounded in reality. It's psychological, subconscious vomit rising to the surface. It's essential humanness. Centered, admittedly, around someone important--but no one worthy of such intense emotion should have allowed you to get so far gone.

I'd like to believe I'm not alone in this, that everyone descends into a melodramatic puddle once in a while, reaches into their past and grasps for what has most strongly represented life. I guess it's a nervous breakdown. Except I'm publishing it rather obscenely, maybe for the sake of catharsis.

Almost December 6, 2007--

To me, one year ago:

It's okay. You're here, you're sane, you're faulted, you're loved.

Before the year is out, you'll better understand a few things about love:

1) You know better than anyone what you feel. Period.
2) A truly complicated relationship is no less complicated when the apparent tumor is removed. That only means you have to look dysfunction in the face.
3) In a relationship, more important than how deeply you care for someone is whether you're cared deeply for.

And, on the other side:

4) It is terrifying to be held responsible for someone else's emotions. Especially when you care for that person.

I would tell you to proceed with caution, but you will do no such thing. I would tell you to wear sunscreen, but you didn't do that either.

When you get to this date, you won't be resolved. You won't be satisfied.

You will be embraced. You will be progressive.

You will be okay. You have your friends.

You have me.