the world keeps moving

it's october.
it's autumn.
leaves are changing and it's getting cold.
we'll see how it feels being back in the real world, having seasons change as i live.
my gap year felt like one long season, a summer stretched for sixty weeks, that just happened to get cold in the middle.


i'm wishing more and more that i could draw. and not even for my art class.
i was thinking yesterday about how i feel like i can sum up my august in a single frame: EB's room in his apartment, floor messy, daylight streaming in, him sprawled across his beddinge, hair messy. i saw that image so much that month, every day i had to leave "bright and early" at 2 pm, got dressed while he prepared to go back to sleep.

9 days until EB, 10 days til home.
and so much work this week.


i don't want to write a paper tomorrow/this evening, i want to spend all of my tomorrow making marks and lines and symbols for the new art unit: line expressing human attributes. we can do literally anything.
we listed over fifty attributes, we have to choose 25, and we can even use ones that aren't listed.
people put up words like hungry and starving.
i kind of want to stay away... but maybe i'll make some kind of minimalist representation of a ribcage.



i'm so fucking fat. my roommate was out when i was getting dressed, and despite the bitter chill settling into our rooms (the heat isn't on yet, because the weather's just being pissy), i stood in front of the full-length naked for a few seconds. i tried to remove myself from my perception of myself, to fundamentally redefine the way i think about me, as EB says i have to.
i talked to him about how i felt lately, that he was getting sick of me and i had no one to talk to about this anymore. i told him how i liked having someone that could be patient with me when my irrational panic sets in and tried to calm me down without telling me to stop because it's ridiculous.
he noted my use of past tense. he says he's still that person, he just doesn't want me to "indulge these habits. giving you space and being endlessly supportive is equal to being a crutch, which i understand is often necessary, but i want to be more than that for you."
i'm appreciative, but he's going about it all wrong.
i'm still determined to keep it to myself.


but as i was saying: i tried to just look at myself... and i couldn't, i couldn't. it was horrifying, what i saw. so many curves where curves shouldn't be. i tried to see how anyone could ever look at that body and desire it, touch it, be turned on by it, but thinking about that almost made me sick. thinking about it now almost makes me cry.


i kind of cheated on my no-cutting promise. i kind of just lightly scratched myself with just the very tip of a safety pin, doing nothing more than making it red and irritated. it doesn't do the trick, but it gives me something to remind me not to eat. as long as i can see it, it tells me not to indulge.
oh. someone else saw my arm. i ignored that, too.



i don't like it when it gets cold. not because i mind the cold, but because i know winter's coming, which depresses me for two reasons. one: holidays. i hate holidays. they all make me feel alone. especially thanksgiving and christmas. every holiday season i wonder who'll "adopt" my mother and i for the day, make us feel like we have a family. sometimes it's our own biological family - though i haven't really seen them since my uncle passed away last october, our only real blood tie to them - but they don't do anything to make us feel a part of any sort of family.
reason two: the past two winters i've been reminded of that time i was happy. and it seems like a lifetime ago, and by contrast my winters are so sad and lonely. january and february remind me of KW, and spending every weekend with him, the twenty-degree nights on central park benches, his hands in my coat pockets.
i'm finally less nostalgic for him, but no less nostalgic for the way i felt. i've never liked anything more.
i just hate it, i hate this whole season. it's not even winter, but i see the dark woods approaching and i can't wait to be free of them... in march.


i have work to do. i should do it, i suppose, before my next class.


all i want is for something to change my mind and make me hate this time of year less.
before i cut myself to pieces.