I carry them with me**

Do you ever feel as though your heart is going to shatter into a million pieces and fall to the ground, leaving a trail of ashy bits behind you as you run down the sidewalk?

Lately that has been my foremost sensation...that a part of me is crumbling, breaking down into thousands of shattered pieces. The remnants are unrecognizable, as I change into being something or someone that I hardly know.

Grief, sadness, despair--they change us from being joyful and happy individuals into ghosts of who we once were, broken by the circumstances around us, from constant disappointment, from loneliness encompassing us.

There's dust covering parts of this keyboard. I absently trace my finger through it as I pause for a break in these thoughts. It seems to me, that wiping off the keyboard should symbolize something more, a cleansing or new beginning, but in a few days the dust will settle again, and I'll be myself, the girl who wants someone, anyone to look at her with something more in their eyes than vague notions of lust or even worse, disinterest.

How can we travel through life, surrounded by so many people, contained in these bodies that we want to break free from, somehow finding contentment and happiness in who we are even though we sometimes desperately crave far more than what life has given us?

So it goes on and on...the constant humdrum this and that of life, even as we fight to be something more or exist as something deeper than what we are, there's that frightening realization that we're simply treading water, trying to stay afloat in these dark cold waters, unable to see a horizon, unsure of where to swim to with no land in sight.

It's easy to see how people start down the dark path that eventually leads to self-mutilation and then sadly suicide. Those people are the ones who believe that their lives are meaningless for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps they're the only ones who truly see the true futility of life and bowing to that knowledge choose to behave selfishly and move on to something else...It's scary how desperate those people must be, if they'd rather face the unknown than accept and deal with the problems life hands us in the daylight.

No, I'm not in the slightest bit suicidal. I don't consider ending your life a viable option to dealing with the eternal issues of life. But I do sympathize with people who struggle with depression, as I think I might do so just a bit. I know that there's no point in dwelling in on the past or on hurtful memories, but there's just this leaning towards doing so...towards picking that scab, reopening all those painful thoughts, constantly examining choices we have made and wondering what we may have done differently, wondering whether going down a different path would have affected the outcome, trying to avoid repeating those mistakes in the future.

Sometimes we give it our all and when nothing happens, when we're left alone hoping with our fantasies, hopes and dreams crashing around us, when we startle awake to the empty bed, the cold pillow beside us...when we give it our all and we're still left alone, that's when we hurt the most, that's when we reach the bottom.

I swallow down the lump that rises in my throat when "Beautiful Disaster" plays on this computer. ("...She's giving boys what they want, trying to act so nonchalant...afraid they'll see she's lost her direction...") The cold truth stings. I can hardly think of anything else, other than the first night of it all. No, the second night. The first night was against my will, as I lay drunk on the bed and the equally drunk guy pawed me until I fell off the bed and crawled into the living room to sleep on the couch. I sobbed in the shower later that day, scrubbing myself clean. The second night, I wandered into the same bed with acceptance and kissed another drunk but very different guy. He interlocked his fingers with mine and kissed my temple, our legs wrapped around each other, his feet cold against my warm ones. He should matter less than he does, but my heart and head are fucked and I can't separate the two.

And after those two it's just many, a line of different guys that I should keep track of but can barely remember. I can try to hang onto the names and faces, but what's the point? Like the people who hit a certain point in their lives where it's sink or swim, I have to strike out for a shore somewhere. Treading water can only last for so long and it's meaningless. I'll swim in any direction regardless of whether I see shore or not. The ones who don't matter, the ones who I've kissed and touched, the ones who are just vague faces and shapes...they're behind me, below me, inside me, and I carry them with me.