Sometimes I can smell the hospital smell. I don't know why...certain kinds of sanitizer, I guess, or the clothes that I'm wearing, the combination of the fabric smell and whatever detergent I've been using, or psychological assocations. I could smell it a minute ago, and it gave me the shivers. Not the good ones. I hate hospitals and I've spent much more time in them than people should have to. Most of the time before I was even six years old, so I don't remember much, but it's still in there. Along with the two seizures I had as a three-month-old, I had constant respiratory infections as a kid. Croup, pneumonia, bronchitis. It was hardest on my brother, I think. My parents were old enough to understand and I was too young to understand, but he was just the right (wrong?) age for it to be kind of traumatic. He's much more squeamish about hospitals than I am, actually.

And, you know, I try to joke around about the health stuff because it makes it easier (humor is my primary defense mechanism about everything, anyway), and it's the best way to deal with it, and it puts other people at ease at the same time, which then makes me feel a little better. But I do get scared sometimes. I know that the psychogenic explanation for my seizures is the most likely one at this point, but it's not the only thing that's wrong with my body. I have constant aches and pains and fatigues and it's gotten so much worse in the last couple of years. My energy level has decreased so much. I can't live the same way I used to. I need to rest so much more often. I'm more sensitive to temperature and my joints ache all the time. I'm always dizzy and my stomach is always getting fucked up (it always has, but that's been getting worse, too.) And, you know, all this plus the seizures...I am just not convinced that the answers have been found yet. And I hate admitting it, really I do, but it does get seriously scary sometimes. Like when I couldn't see for two hours after my last one. And having the history of such an utter lack of fucking compassion with the way people dealt with it in high school - it all makes it harder to deal with now because of that in my past.

And, you know, fuck. I miss someone from the past today, really badly. I have been lately, in general, but it's worse today. Our relationship was never a healthy one and I know, intellectually, that it's probably better off for me to be apart from him. We both brought out things in one another that we probably shouldn't have been pulling out. Some things need to stay underneath, sometimes. But, God, I had never felt more extraordinary or creative or utterly understood. There was soulmate - fucking soulmate! - potential there and sometimes I really thought he had been created for me and me for him. And I don't go for shit like that. But he made me believe it, or at least want to.

I remember when I used to go to dark places just to devastate myself, just so that I could have him comforting me. I needed him all the time, not just when I was breaking down, but every day, on my ordinary everyday levels of misery, but I couldn't tell him that because I was too afraid of losing what little I had. Our relationship had already utterly fallen apart once by that point, and I couldn't lose him so completely again by pushing it too hard, getting too intense. So I let myself crumble just so that I could have him put me back together again. One of the most fucked-up, self-destructive things I've ever done. I'm lucky I didn't push it farther than I did.

And yet right now I'm feeling like I want to do it again, like I would if he were here. Push it again. Is that even love? I don't know what it is, how it qualifies, but I know that I want him in my life again, as ill-advised as that probably is. We were so perfect for each other and so terrible for each other at the same time. I have never needed anybody so much, nor ever felt so needed, but maybe that's not something I should keep pushing for. Like I said, is that even love? It's a pretty fucked up love if it is, but right now I kind of wouldn't have it any other way.

Whatever it is, I want it back. Whatever he is, I want him back.