Journal Entry Number 369

It's cold here. Can you feel it? God, I'm getting lost again, in my head, inside in the snow, in this stone castle in my imagination. I'm flying high above the granite buildings on a sandstone cloud, droplets of ice stinging my cheeks like crystal shards. The air in my lungs shocks me, instantly freezes the tender tissues that desperately need to be kept warm. My fingers...my fingertips are turning blue. I can't breathe. Why did they leave me here again? I wasn't good. I wasn't bad. I wasn't good enough. That's it.

It's so confused, this sky, this thunder, this mud swirling in a dirty ribbon down the broken street drain. There's a rickety man in rancid clothing, torn rags drenched in brown dirt from the cars, who is lying on the sewer grate to keep warm. Maybe he's not breathing. I don't see a white cloud by his lips. It's okay, I say to myself. Ignore it. Ignore it. It has nothing to do with you. But it does. I can't turn away. My eyes are lidless, peeling and dry. The biting wind steals away my vision, blurs it beneath a layer of waterfall tears. My fingers curl in the pockets of my jacket. There is a hole in the bottom of the right one.

'We were never this dead'. Paraphrased. Where is that from? A play? A Raisin in the Sun, I think...when the man, the father, the husband finally breaks down and becomes a disgrace. Breaks himself into pieces. Becomes a disappointment. Fuck, aren't we all? If not to someone else, then to ourselves. Come on! Can't you see it? Goddamnit it! Where are you? Why have you left me? Where did you go? Why couldn't I go too?

But it's useless to think about it. My feet trudge along in the slush that's pretending to be the offspring of snow and rain but is a poorer version of it. Something much more dirty. No one wants it. No one thinks it's beautiful. It soaks into my shoes, makes me think of frostbite. I'm almost too tired to be ashamed.

Quiet. So quiet. Snow falling soft and lovely and lonely on a landscape as forlorn as my mind. That sounds so fake. I used to think that talking, that pills, that that wonderful feeling of not caring, would help me. It was okay until you left. No, that's a lie. Everything was falling apart even before you walked away, before you stopped acknowledging my voice on the other end of the line. The thing is, I think it was my fault. Kind of sick that I'm killing myself everyday. That's what you used to ask me: "Why can't you love yourself?". I never could answer you.

I wish I could ask you...I wish I could say...

I close my eyes and tilt my face to the sky.