Wednesday, September 29, 2010

I don't know if I've mentioned this before here, but for a couple of years now, I've decided that I want my first-dance song at my wedding, should I ever choose to get married, to be "Fade Into You" by Mazzy Star. It's a really beautiful, dreamy, lush, gently orchestral song with a softly lilting rhythm that is just perfectly romantic without being saccharine. There is, of course, only one person I've ever actually fantasized about marrying (and only one person with whom I've ever actually seen any real point to marriage. I never understood why people even really bother until I met him.)

I try not to get overly sentimental. It's so easy to slip from being emotional into being maudlin.

But I'd rather be at the mercy of my emotions than be dead inside. My therapist that I saw while I was home wants me to get a tattoo and drink and have sex and wear leather pants and be a little bit reckless and young and feel strong. I would rather be a mess than feel nothing. And I've felt so little over the past few years, other than a quietly deadened loneliness. I so rarely get really sad or happy or angry. All I feel is my weak, sick, painful body.

That's not who I want to be, anymore.

I used to go to a lot of concerts. They're one of the real highlights, actually, of my middle school and high school life. Music was a big part of what kept me going. When I had super long thick hair I gave myself whiplash from thrashing around in my room. To Nirvana, usually. In early high school I was in love with someone who loved Nine Inch Nails, so I started listening to them, too. For weeks at a time I would wake up to "Head Like a Hole" playing from my CD player. (Pretty Hate Machine was my favorite NiN album. It still is. I find that there's a playful and irreverent spirit to it that was just lost later on.) I painted my fingernails black over crimson nail polish and wore combat boots. I didn't sleep much. I dreamed a lot. I was skinny and nervous and too pale. I cried a lot and sometimes forgot to eat. I hissed and sneered and sometimes walked arm-in-arm with the boy I loved down the hallways and felt so happy that it hurt, because I know how fleeting that intensity was. I loved him painfully, unimaginably, with an almost physical force. I wrote all the time.

And I was oh, so far from happy. But that girl is gone. I'm afraid that I'll never be that bold, that intense, that vital ever again.

Being back at school isn't so bad. It's hardest on the weekends. My classes are great and exciting and stimulating and they keep me going through the week. The weekends are the tough part. They always have been. I dig deep and find little more than emptiness.

Leather pants are a start. Tattoos maybe, body piercings. Modeling myself, slightly at least, in this regard, after the pure raging id that is Faith from Buffy, played by the ravishing Eliza Dushku.



Obviously, crossbows come later. But a little more id in my life is not a bad idea.