I wrote this piece last night and finished it this morning. I sent it to Bex moments ago.


She sits alone in her room. She hasn’t gotten out of bed yet, but she has sat up. She has her legs over the side of the bed. Her feet are not touching the floor. She has always wished she was a little bit taller. Not really tall, but maybe a few more inches. She’s never been able to go where the tall girls go. She sits on the side of the bed thinking about all of the bad choices she’s made in her life, up to and including last night. She’s wondering why she makes these bad decisions knowing that they’re bad decisions and then still doing these things anyway. What compels her? It’s not like it’s a new phenomenon, she’s been making terrible choices her whole life. Like Charles Hunt, her first boyfriend, who is now in jail for armed robbery and aggravated assault. He set the tone for all men to follow. It’s like she needs to be treated badly to feel good. Every choice in her life she over-analyzes like this. With this much introspection, you’d think she’s make better choices. But she doesn’t.
She jumps down to the cold hardwood floor and pads naked across the room to the boom-box sitting atop her dresser. She hits play and Regina Spektor’s “Begin to Hope” CD begins spinning and a few seconds later “Fidelity” comes out of her cheap blown out speakers. 
It sounds like shit but she doesn’t care. It makes her feel exactly how she wants to feel right now. She begins to dance a quirky little jarring dance to the song. She’s still tired and a little hung over, but the music compels her to jump and spin in her little room. She’s smiling from the dancing and she’s crying a little because the song makes her feel so much. Maybe too much, her over-analytical mind thinks. Maybe she feels too much all of the time about everything. And this thought makes her cry even more. Because what’s the alternative? She’s crying and she’s dancing. And she’s still mostly asleep.
When the song ends, she forces herself to begin her day. She has so much to do, and no desire to do anything. She wants to crawl back into bed and pull her blanket over her head. It’s the same blanket she’s been using to hide from the world since she was a little girl and her biggest fears were in her mind, back when monsters were real and boys were gross. She sees that blanket now and wants nothing more than to curl up in a little ball under it and hide one more time. She doesn’t want to face the world. She doesn’t even want to eat breakfast. And that’s saying something because she loves breakfast. She loves everything about breakfast. She loves breakfast more than she loves men. And she loves men.
She loves men so much that it’s gotten bad for her. Even if she knows it’s bad for her or it will end badly, she just can’t stop loving them. She needs them. She also hates herself for needing and craving the affection of men so much. She considers herself to be a fiercely independent woman, and yet she can’t seem to stay away from men. She feels better about herself when men compliment her. When they pay attention to her.
She begins crying again. Because why does she need this validation? What’s it all about? Why can’t she just be happy with who she is?
Regina is still singing to her and she sits back down on the bed. She reaches over and has a sip of water from the glass that she keeps on the table next to her bed. She looks over to the other table on the other side of the bed. It is empty except for a lamp. That was where he used to keep his desk calendar and his glasses, keys and wallet when he was here. Now it is empty except for a thin layer of dust. Noticing the dust, she looks around her room, and sees the horrible shape it’s in. It’s a mess. She wants it to be clean, but she just doesn’t have the energy to do it. Her desire to do nothing far outweighs her desire for a clean room. It’s been that way for weeks now. Or is it months? There’s something to be said for inertia. She’s not happy about her current situation, yet she has no desire to change anything. She begins to wonder where this inaction has come from. Has she always been this indecisive? She thinks she remembers a time when she would make up her mind to do something, and then she would do it. Today is not that day.
Even the burst of energy that got her dancing her awkward dance just moments ago is gone. With no physical stimuli she retreats back into her head. Living in her head is what she’s used to and it’s where she’s more comfortable to begin with. It’s like coming home. She wants to live life fully out in the world making spur of the moment choices, and being spontaneous, but she just can’t stop living in her head. She sometimes feels crippled by her own thoughts. She wonders if there’s some kind of genetic problem with her. Why would her own thoughts conspire to cripple her?
The point is moot right now because the song “Samson” begins to play and her eyes water up with tears. She falls over on the bed and her face screws up into a painful grimace and now she can’t stop the tears now. The heavy sobs have her actually bouncing on the bed. There is so much pain in her heart right now, but she revels in it, she begins to really enjoy her pain. It has become so familiar that it has gotten almost comfortable. She feels like there’s a hole in her soul and she likes it. These self-destructive thoughts make her cry even more. Surely she’s some sort of freak. Nobody should be feeling this much pain and emptiness, and if they do, they certainly should not enjoy it on any level.
Now her doubts and sorrow spiral out and she begins to think about him again. She promised herself she wouldn’t even think about him anymore. But she starts to rehash all of the same thoughts she’s thought over and over again. He keeps telling her he loves her. Even now, after all that has happened. Which just makes her angry. How can he claim to love her and then put his dick in every girl he laid eyes on? Who does that? And it makes her angry to think this, angry with herself and her sense of morality and justice, but she thinks it’s not so much the cheating on her that she has a problem with, it was the lying about it. He wasn’t just her lover, he was her best friend. Who lies to their best friend? She’s getting angry again now just rolling the idea around in her head. She wishes she had hit him. She really wishes she had smashed him in his pretty face. Broken that smug little nose, wiped that smirk off of his arrogant face. She wants to have done it so bad, that she replays the night over in her mind, but this time she’s editing the events to include her hitting him. She can actually feel the pain in her hand as she connects with his soft nose and cheek. She has never been in a fight before (except for that one time in third grade when Marci Jenkins pushed her and she kicked Marci in the shin and they both cried until Mrs. Murphy came and broke it up), she has never hit anybody, yet she knows exactly how it would have felt to punch him in his lying face. She tries to live a life without regret, but she regrets not having done that. The line from Fight Club rings around in her head when she tries to convince herself that she’s a pacifist and doesn’t really want to hit anybody, but she wonders how much you can know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight. She wonders how well she knows herself.
She knows she needs to spend a lot of time by herself with herself, and yet she misses his presence on the other side of the bed. She thinks that the bed’s just too big without him. Even though intellectually she knows it’s for the best. Her heart still wants him next to her. Now she’s feeling weak again. She forces herself to sit up, to stop crying and to get out of bed. She still feels weak and apathetic, but she knows she needs to get going. She’s going to do everything she needs to do today and she’s not going to freak out and she’s not going to start crying in public. She swings her feet over the side of the bed, jumps down and pads over to the boom box and opens the CD compartment without hitting stop. She likes to see the disc slowly come to a stop inside. She takes it out and puts in Zeppelin’s In Through The Out Door. This’ll make her feel better. She doesn’t understand why she keeps putting in sad shit that’ll make her cry like Regina. Zeppelin will make her dance around the room and feel happy. Really happy. She skips ahead to Fool in the Rain. She’s starting to feel it even now. She cranks it up loud so she can hear it throughout the house. She goes to the kitchen and grabs a banana. She begins to clean up a little from last night. Putting her clothes that she left in the living room onto the giant pile of clothes in the corner of her bedroom. She’ll clean it all up some day. Just not today. She throws her banana peel away and dances herself into the bathroom. She washes her face and brushes her teeth all while dancing around like a free little windmill.
She feels good to be up and moving. It’s weird. She never wants to get up and get moving, but once she does, she always feels better for having done it. It reminds her of that time when she jumped off of that forty foot cliff into that lake. She was absolutely terrified before she jumped, so terrified that she couldn’t move and almost couldn’t breathe. But something compelled her to get up and just do it. And after having done it she felt like she could do anything. She did it again and again after that. Every time she is faced with something new, she gets incredibly scared at first. Then, once she does it, she wonders what the big deal was. Like getting out of bed this morning, like jumping off of that cliff, like living without him.
It also helps to live each day like it’s going to be your last. If you really think that this will be your last day, it’ll help you do something exciting on that day. Because really there is no future. The future is just a concept. It doesn’t exist. The future has as much power over your decisions as does the monster under the bed. She keeps telling herself that, but she still can’t help wondering and worrying about the future, whether it exists or not. She still has bills to pay and even though it’s in the future, she’s going to have to put that rent check in the mail on the first of the month. So she still has to plan for that. These two thoughts doing battle in her head right now are part of why she feels crippled most of the time. Instead of doing things, she’s thinking and worrying about doing things. This is no way to live.
She goes into her room. Pulls a dress over her head, slips into some flip flops, grabs her purse and her keys and turns off Zeppelin. She walks over to the door, and without looking back or thinking about what she could be forgetting, she walks out and locks the door behind her. She smiles up into the bright sunny day and walks across the lawn to her crappy little car and feels happy and in control.