to this day. I open up my

fucking cunt.  I’m bleeding.  What an ugly side of existence.  I’m just a little girl.

I wish, anyway.  I’ll never be

except in ways that keep my

ugly side from sight.

Related posts:

1. Fractured
2. Torture and Time
3. I Don’t Know How To Feel About Sex
4. I Don't Know How To Feel About Sex
5. Stop it! Shut up! It’s too ugly!

There aren’t many days left of this, are there?  The loss will subside sooner rather than later?  Because I think I’ve been through enough.  I think the molestation, and the rapes, and the abortion, and the years of emotional abuse, and the frequent panic attacks, and the palpitations, and the social ineptitude, and the  last half decade of trying, trying as hard as I can to keep it together and going, to improve myself has been enough.

How much longer can I endure?

Sam and I cleaned the house yesterday in hopes the grief would fleck off like the dust.  Maybe it worked for him; I still feel a fist reaching into my abdomen, up my chest cavity, grasping my bloody heart.  Nothing is stopping the crying these past two weeks.  I think of the day, if this keeps up, when I’ll become as adept at hiding my tears as I am at hiding my twitches.

It started around the same time I stayed home with the flu, two weeks ago.  Maybe it was the rare time to myself to think or one of my delirious fever dreams, but it occurred to me, just as Sam will never again be the person he was around Sang, I will never again be the person I was around Sang.

Even now, I’m crying uncontrollably, nervous I’ll be caught falling apart.  Two months later, the loss, formerly a seeming leech at my back, has begun to resemble an autoimmune disease cannibalizing me.  My palpitations are its gnashing at my heart between meals.

Sam is the only person with the patience to deal with me in this state.  It may be my ravaged self-esteem, but I haven’t felt I can trust anyone else for some time now, and no one’s pushed hard enough for me to feel they really want me to budge.  So, here I am, alone with my cat and Sam, and I’m comfortable, if nothing else.  I don’t think I have the strength to make it another day, but I don’t seem to have a choice.  That seems to be a theme in my life: I have no choice.  No one does, actually.

What’s all my crying worth in the end if I recognize everyone is suffering?  The agreement of existence is to keep enduring the suffering for the chance of reward, right?  It’s a blatantly Judeo-Christian approach to life, but what else do I have to focus on as I go forward?  Why else take this shit if I’m not going to stop hurting so goddam much one day?  Why do others?

Fuck fuck fuck.  I want to scream it, but I won’t.  I can’t.  Mom said that if I scream too loud, I’ll burst the little box inside my throat that holds my voice, and then I won’t be able to speak at all.  I’ll have to make noise with the stuff around me to call her attention, but there won’t always be things around, especially if I fall and can’t get up.  So, there will be times when I’ll need her, but she won’t know and I won’t be able to tell her, because I screamed, so I’ll die.  And then she’ll die from the grief.  So, I don’t scream. If I scream, I’ll cry, and then she’ll give me something to cry about.

There’s never enough to cry about.  The random circumstances that comprise existence demand more tears than the daily flashbacks, and the constant nausea, and the shaky hands, and the medication that never quite works, and the insomnia, and the sexual dysfunctions, and the self-loathing produce.  With every new strike, I become increasingly convinced, Life won’t stop until I’m dead.

Related posts:

1. Freewriting Panic Attack: The Building. Shaken. Up.
2. Freewriting Panic Attack: Holding Myself Up Normal
3. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
4. Torture and Time
5. Another Night.

So, know that I don’t want her.  She’s too child-minded.  I don’t want to teach her how to survive, nor about herself.  She deserves better than that from a partner.  Besides, I’m not so experienced I deserve to condescend, and she’s not so inexperienced she deserves to be patronized.  It wouldn’t work.

And I don’t want her, anyway.  She’s still hiding from herself.  She still doesn’t accept who she is.  It’s true that I don’t accept myself either, but I at least know who I am.   I’ve negotiated my time, even my body, to gain the answers from my rapists I felt I needed to get, and when that didn’t stop the flashbacks and the anxiety and the sexual dysfunction, I suffered the mental anguish an obsessive endures when a problem comes to our attention.  Meanwhile, she’s texting the man who victimized her.  I can hear her inside voices, insistent like creditors, chanting “I need to know.  I need to know.”  I know her heartbeat felt irregular to her, and her hands probably shook a little, making typing on her iPhone difficult.  And I know he had no healing for her.

It’s unfair of me to wonder amidst her piquing suffering, what happens to me while she discovers herself.  I try not to notice how much I want to kiss her lips.  I kiss her cheek instead.  No one ever told me a woman could feel emasculated.  As it is, I don’t feel comfortable anymore calling her with my problems, as overwhelming as they feel now.  I don’t want to upset her or seem weak.  I’m torn between protecting her and snatching her neck for my lips.

It wouldn’t work.  I’m a five-foot Dominican girl with a big puff of curls who wants to be a male sex symbol.

Related posts:

1. Butterfly: An Introduction
2. Fractured
3. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
4. My Boyfriend Hates Women
5. Questions and Answers

Related posts:

1. I Don’t Know How To Feel About Sex
2. I Don't Know How To Feel About Sex
3. I Want to Stop Writing About What Happened to Me.
4. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
5. Freewriting: Madness

I don’t even care, and that pisses me off.

But I don’t know what to do with my anger.  I don’t know what to say about it or even why it’s happening.

I can’t hear myself in my own head anymore.  My writing voice is gone.  I’m searching my old journals for it, but I’m blocked.  I’m mute.  I am mute.  How do I begin to say anything?  How do I begin to channel a voice I can no longer remember?

I can’t accept it.  That’s a more precise phrasing.  My voice is in here with me, but I’m judging it so harshly…

I’m afraid I don’t know what to say.  I want to scream at the top of my lungs until I collapse unconscious.  I want lively experiences I’ll never have, living the way I’ve been since graduation.

So, what needs to change now?!  What do I need to do to be happy?  Because college wasn’t it.

Related posts:

1. Torture and Time
2. Another Night.
3. The Sated Life
4. Help Me.
5. Interminably Hopeless

It wasn’t even an issue until Andy from the dorms– I dream of taking a bat to his legs, shattering his hip when he’s down, thereby crippling him for life.  But that wouldn’t make me feel better.  Only when I know he’s dead, incapable of hurting another person again, will I feel better.  Only when everyone stops cautiously whispering about mental illness and sexual assault will I feel better.

Another reason to lash myself: I haven’t yet yelled above a whisper.  I need to practice screaming for a while.

Tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
2. This Is My Ugly Side
3. Fractured
4. Torture and Time
5. Indulgence Is For Survivors

Birthing blame twisted

sick uprooted
upended over
done and terrified
of conscience

don’t kill me
but I don’t want
to live
you get

me you know
you feel it
too it’s obvious
we’re all

twisted lies hurting us
all eating our foundation
we’re collapsing in sick

and twisted bound in tundras
of existence no life
but microscopic
moss

and water in my mind
pushing revolution out
like Athena
from Zeus I’m

heretic.

I don’t believe in this poem, but I’m forcing myself to post everything I write, liked I used to, from now on.

Officially welcoming myself back to the world,

Luz

Related posts:

1. Baby Steps Suck
2. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
3. Suffering Numbness
4. I Don’t Know How To Feel About Sex
5. I Don't Know How To Feel About Sex

That is, in the face of the deaths seemingly piling up around me lately, I’m okay.

In fact, my major stressor has become the fear that my late sense of peace will end.  Because if this ends, then I didn’t learn anything new.  And I’ll struggle to control myself—again.  Then, I’ll know the peace was really shock from Sang’s death.  Then, this is just another turn of the chemical tides.  It’s always—

I’m catastrophizing.  Realistically, it’s more likely the peace I feel is due to the overall peaceful environment I’ve constructed around me.  I have several inspiring relationships in my life.  I have a steady income and health insurance.  I have an able body and a highly capable mind.  True, I recently lost one of my best friends to what boils down to the limitations of science.  Just today I held back tears as I told a Sang story.  Yet, that I was able to exercise that much control surprises me.  My voice only broke a few times, and I had the foresight to lower my gaze to hide the rising tide hazing my vision.  It was a small step but a step forward nonetheless.

Publishing this post tonight is the biggest step of all, actually.  The worst thing a depressive can do is isolate.  So, I’m doing what anybody who’s had effective therapy treatment does: communicating.  Every word hurts, and every sentence feels like a small miracle I alone labored to create.  Even as I write these words, I’m wondering if I’ll have the courage to press the “Publish” button to my right.  If I do, it’ll be a big step out of grief and depression.  If I publish again tomorrow, I’ll have started myself on the long journey back to full mental and physical health.  Writing, my shameless monster, washes me of the guilt and self-disgust that’s too long kept my skin from breathing.  Publishing adds meaning to an otherwise masturbatory skill.

So, in a sense, I give myself meaning by publishing.

I’m sorry.  I’m either extremely focused or disturbingly absent-minded.  This post seems to drift between the two states.  I irresponsibly allowed the Clonazepam to run out in between psychiatric visits.  Though I did have the job of finding a new psychiatrist during that interim, I should have made the matter a higher priority than I did.  I—I’m whipping myself.

Not a new problem.  I know.

I’m trying to scream on paper, but I’m not talented enough to know how to do it.  So too simply put, nothing feels urgent anymore.  Yet, I’m full of all this quiet, distant tension.  Not quite dissociation, I’m compelled to enjoy it.  But I just don’t trust it to be good.  There’s an anxiety whispering from there.  It’s creeping up my throat, and I want to let it out.  If I let it out, maybe I’ll be able to take a deep enough breath.  I can stop this yawning.  I’m always so exhausted, lately.

I just have to press “Publish.”

Related posts:

1. Freewriting Panic Attack: Holding Myself Up Normal
2. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
3. Freewriting Panic Attack: There’s Never Enough to Cry About
4. Freewriting Panic Attack: This Is As Close to Being Inside My Head As I Could Have Gotten You Through Words
5. Freewriting Panic Attack: The Building. Shaken. Up.

I need help, but no one can help me but me—or so they say.  I argue, it’s hard enough for me to just ask for help; why can’t it be easy to receive that help?  You don’t tell a paraplegic he has to crawl before he can get into rehab.  Yet, there on the border of Normality, stands this army of Manifest Destiny indoctrinates puppeted by Bootstrap Bill Americano, high on justice for us.

I’m scared of what people who interact with me daily at work must think of me.  I’m sure they know I’m weird and maybe dumb.

Dumb isn’t the right word.  I’m awkward because I’m always fighting through a fog to say what I’m thinking.  Very often, midway through my first sentence, I’ve forgotten my intended topic.  I’m sick.  There’s something that makes focusing way too difficult to do.  I almost wish it were a tumor.  At least then, there’d be visible proof, something people can understand, wrong with me.  Instead, I’m traumatized and anxious and affective and it involves chemicals that you’ve never before heard of and will not bother remembering.  As the cliché goes, they’re scared of what they don’t understand.  All they know is Sling Blade and I Am Sam, neither of which was absent depictions of dangerous lunacy, nor are they even about the mentally ill, but the mentally handicapped.  Distinctions are not often clearly drawn in the media, so distinctions are sometimes seen as ignorable…

I’m going off on a rant.  The point is, I’m in pain.  I never know where my mind is going to take me.  After I’m done here, I need to meditate.  It’s getting harder to pretend everything is alright.

Fuck, I’m wallowing!  I want to hit something.  I want to cry.  I want, I want, I want.  I’m like a child.  I’m disgusted with myself.  I’ve been childish.  What’s wrong with me?  That isn’t me.  I’m responsible.  I’m punctual.  I’m diligent.  But right now, lately, even before Sang, I’ve been feeling absurd for dedicating myself to anything.  Everything has felt ethereal for months.  Sang’s death was merely the exclamation mark at the end of a long-thought-out statement: nothing lasts!

I feel clubbed by that exclamation mark.  My twitches have returned with violence.  My nausea has reduced my calorie-intake to somewhere around 1,000 calories.  My memory is non-existent, and my social anxiety is strangling.

If this is grief, it feels a lot like a continuous string of panic attacks.

Related posts:

1. Freewriting Panic Attack: There’s Never Enough to Cry About
2. Freewriting Panic Attack: The Building. Shaken. Up.
3. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
4. Freewriting Panic Attack: A Masturbatory Act, A Big Step
5. Another Night.

Bodies long with

fear

on them. standing

room

◊

only. I

can’t breathe

in this

home of

grieving.

◊

the darkness in

me choking

me—sobbing

−

Surrounded now by the ultimate vocalization of the language that threatened him all his life, Korean—that gave him his first words, that he could never fully comprehend or use, another reason for him to feel less than he was—I’m screaming tears.  The strange sounds are a burden on me.  He was never so strange to me as he is now.  In his life, I understood all his words.

Now I’m reminded I hadn’t heard them all.  All the singing and chanting is pretty.  I recognize the intonations of an Our Father.  But it all makes me very aware of new dimensions to my loss.  There are parts of him and words of his I never heard—and never will.

Time, logic tells me, is what I’m mourning, not Sang.  My self-deprecatory side informs me I’m self-indulgent for groaning so much, as there’s no reason to cry for the dead; it’s all for myself.  Yet, all of me wants him back.  My every fragment acknowledges it.  I feel I’ve lost a life partner.  As much as I would like to always control my emotionality, this is one situation where logic shatters against reality.

As a little relief, I don’t cry as much since the wake on Thursday night.  I knew Sang was gone when I saw his face, peach with make-up, and a wooden cross in his folded hands.  I finished scribbling notes about the service, then collapsed into my grief for the rest of the night.  When I woke Friday, it was near noon.  I had suffered nightmares, and my head ached the whole day from the prior night’s abandoned crying, but I was finally able to hold back crying—usually, anyway.

Only, my leg has started shaking again.  With my wonderful psychiatrist on permanent medical leave, there isn’t much I can do until her replacement can fit me in.

No, I’m being defenseless.  I could have called other psychiatrists.  I even wrote down the contact info to a few in-network doctors.  I didn’t call because I don’t want to talk about my dead sex drive nor, now, Sang.

Life is tiring me out.  What else is there to say?  What will the doctors tell me but to breathe?  I’m screaming wrenching throbbing inside my head.  I can’t tell the difference between grief and depression.  It’s all painful.  I can feel a fear on me.  I want to tear it out by its roots, but its origins are opaque, like a claw reaching through a wormhole.  What else do you want me to say?

I don’t picture him standing up anymore.  Instead, I remember the caked on make-up covering his skin.  The only place the clay mask didn’t cover was the inside of his ear.  The purple-red spot near the ear canal was the only part of him they didn’t touch.  It was a spot they hadn’t bothered with.

I need to know where that spot is in me.

Related posts:

1. Torture and Time
2. Another Night.
3. Suffering Numbness
4. Am I Really In That Much Pain?
5. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares