"You're so vain, you probably think this facebook's about you, don't you, don't you..."

Ashley asked the question randomly as a Facebook post, "Are you always this soft spoken? Are you okay right now?" I believe it is lyric or movie quote, and it was certainly not for me... but I wanted to call her and cry over the line, free minutes for true words (compliments of Verizon Cellular), exchanged between Indiana and New York... "I'm not okay right now. I'm at a loss for words, can't type, can't read, can't say what I mean. I can't even call it soft spoken, that would be spoken at all... It's been happening for weeks now, I don't know where I am. I'm so glad someone can tell. "

But the phone sits untouched, speed dial number 3 remains unpressed, "Call Ash" not voice prompted, more words I can't find. The post sits now 37 minutes of dust covering it, and I didn't say a word.

I fall to lyrics myself, The Talking Heads have been playing in my head for these weeks...

"Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced"

Which is small comfort, but having the words for not having any words, I'll take even that for now. It's a look across the room, a smell that reminds you of something... it's not articulate or even interesting to anyone but me, but there's a sensation, and that at least, is something.

Tonight, I plucked my eyebrows, scrubbed my face, and colored my hair. It's a painstakingly precise ritual, both punishing and satisfying in equal parts. I am killing myself to live attractively so often, the shoes that make the feet bleed come out more often in these waves of pensive quiet, the brows become wire thin, the posture creates aches where the shoulders meet the neck with it's rigid perfection. Every outward fiber of me screams when I fall so mute, but it screams the wrong way, the wrong words. "Look at me" and "Do you see" are not unalike, but are not, by any stretch, the same.

When putting the conditioner on after the dye tonight, my finger slipped along the edge of the foil packet, slicing not enough to bleed, but enough to break a smallish flap of skin from the the rest. I stared at it, felt the sting, and resented wrapping it with an utterly adorable pink band-aid with purple flowers. I do not wear hair-maintenance wounds like battle scars, and resent wearing their treatment like ornamentation. My pointer digit is all wrapped up as I type this, in a perfect pink floral sliver of irony, and for that as well, I don't have the words.

There is something, some overcast sticky-hot wave of humidity settled in just below the airy surface of me, and it's making my throat tight, distracting me... it's displeasing and it's real, and I find myself soft spoken even while trying to shout through it's muggy trappings that nothing is wrong, but no-- I am not okay right now. But the words are sucked into the steaming thickness of it all, and a thin little "I'm just in a weird place lately" barely manages to squeak through. And even that falls not from my mouth at all but fumbling off of my fingers onto a keyboard with its (with my) grammatical errors and lack of accurate analogy and poor use of language in general, as well as ice cream on the keys and difficulties of the likes that Adrienne Rich would call "Mechanical Problems".

I'd like to say it's just one of those things, but even that's not really what I want to say... I don't know what this thing is, I don't have that word either. I'm not okay, and I can't tell anyone about it simply because there isn't a way to, and that is in itself becoming a serious mechanical problem, because making peoples facebook posts about me is tacky, and being soft spoken, however much it may be my reality right now, is simply not me.

"I was thinking of an unrelated thing"

The past weekend has been a tizzied blur of completely unrelated events and thoughts, along with a broken blogger and a missing journal, leaving me to sort out now the fractured bits and pieces that still haunt...


*I want to know when, why and how I became the kind of woman who at any point thought "you know... I'm going to start altering books". I sandpaper books. I splash bleach on books. I adhere things to, remove things from, measure, dye and stamp books. And what is more... I really like it.

And I have no idea how this happens to someone. I mean, where does this kind of things start, really?

*There are maybe 3 people in all the world who can come to my house totally trashed in the middle of the night, really insult me and make it my fault that they must impose upon me in the middle of said night, then pass out in my bed after trying to get some action, and I not at all be hurt, offended and entirely changed in my feelings about them in the morning. 2 of these people would never ever ever begin to do such a thing because a) They don't drink and B) They really honestly love me and to treat me that way would seem somehow inconceivable to them.

The 3rd, well... I suppose if I'm going to be honest, after a trial run it turns out that there is no 3rd.

* I wish someone had told me 6 years ago that those terrifying nightmares that haunt new mothers and send them shooting up in bed shaking and sobbing would never ever ever stop. No one ever ever let on that "Oh, the nightmares after you have a baby" meant "The nightmares you will NEVER stop having about your child after they are born no matter how old they get or how safe they are in waking life"... and I don't know why not. It would be just as easy to say that there will be a lot of nightmares as a continual part of parenthood as it was to tell me that there would be a lot of nightmares when I first gave birth. The mask of motherhood, baby-- we women are the ones who work against each other the most in our secret lives and struggles anshared, so another mother cannot benefit either.