i'm fallin to pieces

what am i gonna do when the best part of me was always you? what am i gonna say when im all choked up and you're okay?

...

...still workin' on it.

I want...

.......to be beautiful. Inside and out.
This is going to be interesting.

the time traveler's wife

Clare: It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays.

I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.

I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

Henry: I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.

Henry: She is glowing at me, although I am unshaven and hung over and just not at my best.

Henry: "Come back to bed, Clare. Come and say good morning."

Henry: "I was thinking; it's very peaceful, here with you. It's nice to just lie here and know that the future is sort of taken care of."

Henry: It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.

Henry: Things happen the way they happened, once and only once.

Clare: All my life I have pretty much just accepted Henry as no big deal; that is, although Henry is a secret and therefore automatically fascinating, Henry is also some kind of miracle and just recently it's started to dawn on me that most girls don't have a Henry of if they do they've all been pretty quiet about it.

Clare: My clothes are soaked in an instant and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, an incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hands on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him.

Henry: "Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something."

Henry: I turn to look at Clare and just for a moment I forget that she is young, and that this is long ago; I see Care, my wife, superimposed on the face of this young girl, and I don't know what to say to this Clare who is old and young and different from other girls, who knows that different might be hard. But Clare doesn't seem to expect an answer.

Clare: "Kiss," I demand, and he kisses me.

Henry: "Kiss me," she demands. I do, and then I'm gone.

Henry: When Clare draws she looks as though the world has fallen away, leaving only her and the object of her scrutiny. This is why I love to be drawn by Clare: when she looks at me with that kind of attention, I feel tat I am everything to her. It's the same look she gives me when we're making love.

Clare: "Henry, what are you afraid of?"

The question surprises me and I have to think about it. "Cold," I say. "I am afraid of winter. I am afraid of police. I am afraid of traveling to the wrong place and time and getting hit by a car or beat up. Or getting stranded in time, and not being able to come back. I am afraid of losing you."

Clare smiles. "How could you lose me? I'm not going anywhere."

"I worry that you will get tired of putting up with my undependableness and you will leave me."

Clare puts her sketchbook aside. I sit up. I won't ever leave you," she says. "Even though you're always leaving me."

"But I never want to leave you."

Henry: I sit down on the broken old La-Z-Boy and Clare squeezes in beside me. I put my arm around her shoulders. She puts her hand on my inner thigh. I remove it, and hold it.

Clare: I used to be so casual about Henry, when I was little; seeing Henry wasn't anything too unusual. But now every time he's here is one less time he's going to be here.

Clare: "I love him. He's my life. I've been waiting for him, my whole life, and now, he's here." I don't know how to explain. "With Henry, I can see everything laid out, like a map, past and future, everything at once, like an angel. . ." I shake my head. I can't put it into words. "I can reach into him and tough time. . .he loves me. We're married because. . .we're part of each other. . . ." I falter. "It's happened already. All at once."

Clare: The thing that worries me is my hair; because of the dry winter air there seems to be twice as much of it as usual. I start to braid it and Henry stops me.

"Don't, please - I want to look at you with it down."

Clare: If Alicia weren't here I would lie down on the couch, put my head on Henry's lap.

Henry: We have reached the private road that leads to Clare's house. She turns in.

"Henry?"

"Yeah?"

"If you could stop, now. . . if you could not time travel any more, and there would be no consequences, would you?"

"If I could stop now and still meet you?"

"You've already met me."

"Yes. I would stop."

Henry: I lie in Clare's arms, cross-eyed with pain. Clare snores, quiet animal snores that feel like bulldozers running through my head. I want my own bed, in my own apartment. Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home. Clare sighs, turns her head, and is quiet. Hi, honey, I'm home. I'm home.

Henry: She turns and I'm holding her awkwardly across the divided seats and now Clare is crying hard, shuddering.

Henry: "My idea of the perfect life would be if we just stayed in bed all the time. We could make love more or less continuously, and only get up to bring in supplies, you know, fresh water and fruit to prevent scurvy, and make occasional trips to the bathroom to shave before diving back into bed. And once in a while we could change the sheets. And go to the movies to prevent bedsores. And running. I would still have to run every morning."

Clare: Henry is stroking my hand with his fingertips. He looks up. "I have something for you. Come and sit over here."

I get up and follow him into the living room. He's turned the bed into the couch and I sit down. The sun is setting and the room is washed in rose and tangerine light. Henry opens his desk, reaches into a pigeonhole, and produces a little satin bag. He sits slightly apart from me; our knees are touching. He must be able to hear my heart beating, I think. It's come to this, I think. Henry takes my hands and looks at me gravely. I've waited for this so long and here it is and I'm frightened.

"Clare?"

"Yes?" My voice is small and scared.

"You know that I love you. Will you marry me?"

"Yes . . . Henry." I have an overwhelming sense of deja vu. "But you know, really . . . I already have."

Clare: Mr. DeTamble: "Tell me, Clare: why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry Henry?"

Everything in the room seems to hold its breath. Henry stiffens but doesn't say anything. I lean forward and smile at Mr. DeTamble and say, with enthusiasm, as though he has asked me what flavor of ice cream I like best: "Because he's really, really good in bed." In the kitchen there's a howl of laughter. Mr. DeTamble glances at Henry, who raises his eyebrows and grins, and finally even Mr. DeTamble smiles, and say, "Touche, my dear."

Clare: We are walking down the street, holding hands. There's a playground at the end of the block and I run to the swings and climb on, and Henry takes the one next to me, facing the opposite direction, and we swing higher and higher, passing each other, sometimes in synch and sometimes streaming past each other so fast it seems like were going to collide, and we laugh, and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.

Henry: "Do you ever lie awake wondering if I'm some kind of joke God is playing on you?"

"No. I lie awake worrying that you might disappear and never come back. I lie awake brooding about some of the stuff I sort of half know about in the future. But I have total faith in the idea that we are supposed to be together."

"Total faith."

"Don't you?"

Henry kisses me. "Nor Time, nor Place, nor Chance, nor Death can bow my least desires unto the least remove."

Henry: The house envelops us, watches us, contemplates us as we make love in it for the first time, the first of many times, and afterward, as we lie spent on the bare floor surrounded by boxes, I feel that we have found our home.

Clare: I sit down next to the pile of clothes and scoop them up, still warm from Henry's body, and sit until all their warmth is from my body, holding them. then I get up and go into our bedroom, fold the clothes neatly and place them on our bed. Then I continue makin dinner as best I can, and eat by myself, waiting and wondering.

Clare: Later, Henry and I are lying in bed. Snow is still falling; the radiators make faint clucking noises. I turn to him and he looks at me and I say, "Let's make a baby."

Henry: I am so accustomed to living on a metaphysical trapeze that I forget that other people tend to enjoy more solid ground.

Clare: My body wanted a baby. I felt empty and I wanted to be full. I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always. And I wanted Henry to be in this child, so that when he was gone he wouldn't be entirely gone, there would be a bit of him with me . . . insurance, in case of fire, flood, act of God.

Henry: I salute my small former self, and thinking about me as a child naturally gets me thinking about Clare, and our efforts to conceive. On one hand, I am all eagerness; I want to give Clare a baby, see Clare ripen like a fresh melon, Demeter in glory. I want a normal baby who will do things normal babies do: suck, grasp, shit, sleep, laugh; roll over, sit up, walk, talk in nonsense mumblings. I want to see my father awkwardly cradling a tiny grandchild; I have given my father so little happiness - this would be a large redress, a balm. And a balm to Clare, too; when I am snatched away from her, a part of me would remain.

Henry: I am a oward. A better man would take Clare by the shoulders and say, Love, this is all a mistake, let us accept it and go on, and be happy. But I know that Clare would never accept, would always be sad. And so I hope, against hope, against reason and I make love to Clare as though anything good might come of it.

Henry: "Ten, nine, eight . . . " and we all take it up: "seven, six, five, four, THREE! TWO! ONE! Happy New Year!" Champagne corks pop, fireworks ignite and streak across the sky, and Clare and I dive into each other's arms. Time stands still, and I hope for better things to come.

Henry: I place my hands over her ears and tip her head back, and kiss her and try to put my heart into hers, for safekeeping, in case I lose it again.

Clare: "What were you so upset about? You were trying to do something, and it didn't work, and you said I wouldn't like it. What was it?"

"How do you manage to remember all that?"

Henry: I am drunk with the overwhelming love I feel for this amazing child, who presses against me as though she belongs to me, as though we will never be separated, as though we have all the time in the world. I am clinging to this moment, fighting fatigue and the pulling of my own time. Let me stay, I implore my body, God, Father Time, Santa, anybody who might be listening. Just let me see Clare, and I'll come along peacefully.

Clare: We both laugh, a little ruefully at first, and then, it hits me, and we laugh in earnest, until our faces hurt, until tears are streaming down our cheeks.

Henry: At two in the morning she finally goes to sleep. I lie next to her, wakeful, watching her breathe, listening to the little fretful sounds she makes, playing with her hair.

Henry: Clare is crouched on all fours, rocking back and forth. I get down on the floor with her.

"Clare?"

She looks up at me, still rocking. "Henry . . . why did we decide to do this again?"

"Supposedly when it's over they hand you a baby and let you keep it."

"Oh, yeah."

Henry: Clare learns against me and clenches my hands in hers.

"Don't leave me," she says.

"I won't," I tell her.

Henry: "Don't leave me," Clare whispers.

"I won't," I tell her again.

Henry: "Should I stay?" I ask Clare.

"Yes! Don't go - stay where I can see you."

"Okay."

Henry: "Henry! Are you there?" Clare calls out.

I stick my head back into the room. "I'm here."

"Stay in here," Clare commands.

Henry: Dr. Montague is watching the fetal monitor. "Tell her you are fine, and she is fine. Sing her a song, yes?"

"Alba, it's okay," Clare says softly. She looks at me. "Say the poem about the lovers on the carpet."

Clare: Sometimes I am glad when Henry's gone, but I'm always glad when he comes back.

Clare: Tears begin to stream from his good eye, he is shaking with sobbing, and I pull him into my lap. I am crying. Henry is curled in my lap, there on the floor, we shake tightly together, rocking, rocking, crying our relief and our anguish together.

Clare: "We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated."

Clare: He's biting my neck and tickling me.

Clare: We are wrapped around each other, for warmth, for reassurance.

Henry: "Alba is perfect. And you are perfect. I mean, as much as I love you, back there, it's the shared life, the knowing each other . . ."

"Through thick and thin . . ."

"The fact that there are bad times make it more real. It's the reality that I want."

Clare: I kiss him, tentatively, and after a moment of hesitation Henry begins to kiss me back, and before too long we are on our way to being all right again. Better than all right. I told him, and it was okay, and he still loves me. My whole body feels lighter, and I sigh with the goodness of confessing, finally, and not even having a penance, not on Hail Mary or Our Father.

Clare: . . . and Henry and I unwrap each other on the studio couch like brand new never before boxes of chocolate and it's not too late, not yet, anyway.

Clare: Gomez: ". . . this guy would chew you up and spit you out . . . he's not at all what you need."

I smile. He's exactly what I need.

Clare: "Do you ever wish you could stop time? I wouldn't mind staying here forever."

Henry: Without Clare I would have given up a long time ago.

Clare: I ask him how he feels, what he needs, and he answers, vaguely or not at all. Although Henry is right here in front of me, he has disappeared.

Clare: It is only wings that I want to give him.

Henry: "Kiss me," Clare says, and I turn to her, white face and dark lips floating in the dark, and I submerge, I fly, I am released: being wells up in my heart.

Clare: "It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other and I think, Don't leave me.

Henry: Clare stirs, turns toward me, onto her side. I study her face. There are a few faint lines, at the corners of her eyes and mouth, that are the merest suggestion of the beginnings of Clare's face in middle age. I will never see that face of hers, and I regret it bitterly, the face with which Clare will go on without me, which will never be kissed by me, which will belong to a world that I won't know, except as a memory of Clare's, relegated finally to a definite past.

Henry: She'll be okay without me, I think as I watch her, but I know that she will not.

Henry: I think of Alba at ten, at fifteen, at twenty. It is not nearly enough, yet. I am not done, yet. I want to be here. I want to see them, I want to gather them in my arms, I want to live -

Clare: It's impossible to believe that Henry, so solid, my lover, this real body, which I am holding pressed to mine with all my strength, could ever disappear.

Clare: I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. The phone rings and rings. I have turned off the machine that answers with Henry's voice. It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.

Clare: Sometimes I wake up and reach for Henry.

Clare: I stare at her thick black eyelashes, her wide mouth, her pale skin; she is breathing carefully, she clutches my hip with her strong hand, she smells of pencil shavings and rosin and shampoo. I kiss the top of her head. Alba opens her eyes, and then her resemblance to Henry is almost more than I can bear.

Henry: "But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second."

Henry: "Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high=wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

I hate to think of you waiting. I know that you have been waiting for me all your life, always uncertain of how long this patch of waiting would be. Ten minutes, ten days. A month. What an uncertain husband I have been, Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus alone and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and sometimes just a plaything of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. Of me - put me deep inside you and then go out in the world and live. Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element. I have given you a life of suspended animation. I don't mean to say that you have nothing. You have created beauty, and meaning, in your art, and Alba, who is so amazing, and for me: for me you have been everything."

Henry: "I love you, always. Time is nothing."

Clare: What am I doing? I am waiting. I am thinking. I am sitting on our bed holding an old plaid shirt that still smells of Henry, taking deep breaths of his smell. I am going for walks at two in the morning, when Alba is safe in her bed, long walks to tire myself out enough to sleep. I am conducting conversations with Henry as though he were here with me, as though he could see through my eyes, think with my brain.

the perks of being a wallflower

"I want to make sure that the first person you kiss loves you. Okay?"

"And she kissed me. It was the kind of kiss that I could never tell my friends about out loud. It was the kind of kiss that made me know that I was never so happy in my whole life."

"So I looked up, and we were in this giant dome like a glass snowball, and Mark said that the amazing white stars were really only holes in the black glass of the dome, and when you went to heaven, the glass broke away, and there was nothing but a whole sheet of star white, which is brighter than anything but doesn't hurt your eyes. It was vast and open and thinly quiet, and I felt so small."

"I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away. And disappear. I know that's wrong because it's my responsibility, and I know that things get worse before they get better because that's what my psychiatrist says, but this is a worse that feels too big."

"There's nothing like the deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons. It was that great."

"I would die for you. But I won't live for you."

"I remember going to sleep last night, and I realized something. Something that I think is important. I realized that throughout the course of the evening, I wasn't happy about Craig and Sam breaking up. Not at all. I never once thought that it would mean Sam might start liking me. All I cared about was the fact that Sam got really hurt. And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn't matter."

"I love my mom so much. I don't care if that's corny to say. I think on my next birthday, I'm going to buy her a present. I think that should be the tradition. The kid gets gifts from everybody, and he buys one present for his mom since she was there, too. I think that would be nice."

"Then, we were quiet for the rest of the song. She held me a little closer. I held her a little closer. And we kept dancing. It was the one time all day that I really wanted the clock to stop. And just be there for a long time."

"She wasn't bitter. She was sad, though. But it was a hopeful kind of sad. The kind of sad that just takes time."

"After I said that, we all got quiet and sad. In the silence, I remembered this one time that I never told anybody about. The time we were talking. Just the three of us. And I was in the middle. I don't remember where we were walking to or where we were walking from. I don't even remember the season. I just remember walking between them and feeling for the first time that I belonged somewhere."

"So I just watched her pack, and I tried to remember as many details as I possibly could. Her long hair and her thin wrists and her green eyes. I wanted to remember everything. Especially the sound of her voice."

"'But mostly, I thought that your being sad was more much important to me than Craig not being your boyfriend anymore And if it meant that I would never get to think of you that way, as long as you were happy, it was okay. That's when I realized that I really loved you.'"

"'Charlie, don't you get it? I can't feel that. It's sweet and everything, but it's like you're not even there sometimes. It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder. What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things.'"

""It's just that I don't want to be somebody's crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it, too. I want them to be able to do whatever they want around me. And if they do something I don't like, I'll tell them.'"

"'Why would I care whether or not he loved me when he didn't really even know me?'"

"I got in my dad's car, and drove away. And I could hear all these songs on the radio, but the radio wasn't on."

"So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them."

"..and then you feel so low you can't feel nothin' at all"

Got an acceptance letter today. Fresno. Feels pretty good now that I know I'm able to get into a university. Now I just gotta finish off the year with good grades and I'm off (hopefully in the SF direction).

Other than that, guessing games suck. Just sayin.

I think I'm finally cracking, or rather, this family is cracking. Mom's on her way to Fresno as we speak to surprise Matt for his birthday by taking him out to dinner. And of course, who better to join her for her son's 21st birthday than David, right? Wrong. Why in the world wouldn't she take her 21-year-old son's father? Let's see..only one answer. But I don't want to say it out loud.

This is getting really ridiculous. It's all the same everyday - wake up to it, come home to it, fall asleep thinking about it - it never fails to find me. I've become almost immune to seeing Dad continuously make attempt after attempt and sigh as he fail fail fails.

"Liz, would you like me to make you something for dinner?"

"No."

"Alright Liz, I'm leaving for work, have a good day."

"......"

I don't want to complain, but I'm so tired of seeing Dad try so hard to do the right thing, and just watch it fall apart every time. I'm just not sure what I should, or even could, do anymore.

Hmm

Vienna - Billy Joel

Story of my life.

Some of the most beautiful people on earth.

A severe case of Senioritis

Senioritis, from the word senior plus the suffix -itis (which refers to inflammation but in colloquial speech is assumed to mean an illness), is a colloquial term used in the United States to describe the decreased motivation toward studies displayed by students who are nearing the end of their middle school, high school or college careers.

I'm not overwhelmed, that's too dramatic. And I'm definately not underwhelmed - that would be an understatement. I'd say its more of a...whelm. Just a simple whelm. Like how in 10 Things I Hate About You...except I'm not in Europe or whatever. Now that school is getting a little tougher and college applications are coming up and SATs and plus the fact that life itself is slowly falling back into its millions and zillions of jigsaw pieces, you'd think things were getting easier from here on out. But in reality, things are just getting even more complicated. It's not a state of depression or anything, I think everyone else is starting to feel it too. We've actually got responsibilities now and things we have to do to start planning for the future, and to us it all seems like everything is happening all at one time, when really, it all happens with great timing.

Another symptom of the deadly case of Senioritis - regret. I never thought I'd feel this way, no matter how many times Mom told me I would, but I really, REALLY wish I would have stuck with all the sports I had played my freshmen year. The more volleyball games I go to, the more I wish I was out there too. I feel like I belong out there or something. And sure, I wasn't this star volleyball or basketball player, and maybe you wouldn't read my name in the newspaper every week..and yes, maybe I wasn't the one getting scouted since my freshmen year...but it was FUN. And I can't believe that I gave it up.

And now that I regret that about the 2 sports that weren't particularly my favorite, I'm beginning to wonder if this is how I'll feel at the end of my last softball season this year. I probably will..which brings me to the self-debate of whether or not to play in college.

Ahhhhhh...things seem so crazy , and it's not even the end of the year! All thanks to the contagious case of Senioritis. Sigh..

Day numero uno

Well well well...I told myself I would never turn to blogging as a form of venting; it was just never for me. Ha, seems as though my plans are falling out of place already. I'm not even really sure how to do this "blogging," to me it has always seemed as an electronic diary, except for the fact that it is fully and forever exposed to the cyber-world...hmmm. Am I wrong? Maybe. Am I crazy for falling into the darkened pit of blogging? Possibly. Am I planning on continuing this terrible habit?

Yes.

I guess. We shall see.

Lately things have just seemed like a blur. Everything I do or say is just because I have to, never because I want to. I feel as though I have no control anymore over the things I used to be on top of; the only thing I can control anymore are my thoughts. I've been living on the outside. I sit there and observe and think, then observe some more. And then think some more. My day no longer consists of the things it used to - everything now seems too routine.

Mom's breathing down my neck, but what else is new. And I know that she every right to, but the fact that I'm in the process of change is making it all the more frustrating. In this case, good intentions are not enough. I'm not sure, maybe I should just show up to the house everyday with a Big Mac in one hand and chocolate shake in the other? Just to convince her that I'm okay.

On a more positive note...

The 18-month old chain that has been holding us back has finally been broken (knock on wood). And honestly?...I have never felt more relieved/happy in my entire life (knock on wood...again). Not to sound a little over dramatic, but I feel like I can actually breathe again. A milllllllllllion-pound weight has been lifted off of my shoulders, and frankly...it's the best feeling in the world.

And on another positive note...

I've set some goals for myself that I've so been holding up so far. And lemme tell ya...I'm doing damn well good. I've got an image of how I want things to be, including myself, and the road to it so far is bump-free. And to make it even better, this image actually has rosy cheeks and puke-free breath.

I miss Myles.

...A lot.

That is all.