So, last night I was reading a book called The Best American Poetry 1993. Found it at the library, cuddled amidst a rather pathetic selection of books. I really have to do something about the poetry collection at my local library. It is just disgraceful. You have no idea how many of the good poets they are missing, nor how much cowboy poetry one small city library can cram onto several bookshelves. I resent hunting for books in that corner. I resent it as much as I love it, which is why I still go.

Anyway, I was trying to read said book of poems, but I just couldn't concentrate. My head has been such a jumble these past few days. And things have been such a mess. My bedroom can attest to that.

Do you ever have a year that you'd just like to rewind and start over? Or a life? Sometimes I feel like that.

Dad called me a walking enigma yesterday, and I didn't say anything. Didn't say anything, because as is usually the case when Dad makes a random observation, he was right.

I don't even understand myself.

But who does, really? Who really truly "gets" what they are? What they have been and can become? No one knows themselves. It's impossible, I think. Which is why the poets go mad. All they do is try and dig themselves deeper. Then they fall in.

So, in pontificating that idea; swishing it around in my head for a while, I've wondered just how much of life is found in giving it up? Like, forget yourself. Forget yourself completely and do and be for other people.

It sounds so right and impossible all at the same time. I want to do that. I want to just be for other people. Be for them the things they cannot be for themselves. Be for them the things they don't want to be. Be for them this safe, reliable, comforting place. Not this unstable, self-deprecating narcissist that I have clawing me up inside so much of the time.

My best friend, in attempt to further woo the object of her affections, took to heart an observation that he made about her a while back. He just told her that he didn't know how to handle her when she was beating herself up all the time. So she decided to stop. She used to make catty comments about herself because it would get laughs, and because she liked feeling like she could laugh about all the things she secretly despised in herself. But she's stopped. She might still think them, but she doesn't say them.

Which is marvelous and traumatizing all at the same time, because she is me, and I am her. We were separated at birth, we've had the same life, the same nicknames, the same hopes, fears, experiences and dreams to the point that it's uncanny. I wish I'd found her sooner than a year ago. But, back to the point, her moving on from this self-deprecation thing is wrecking me, because now that she doesn't do it, I find myself overcompensating for the absence of it, in her, by filling every little hole in a conversation with some negative, demeaning quip about myself.

She's taken to kicking me when I do it. My shins will be very bruised, but maybe the message will sink in eventually.

Sigh. I've been listening to depressing music, and reading depressing poetry, and trying to cram noise and busy into a rather gaping hole inside of me, and it's just not working. I can't do it anymore. But I will. I am not a patient person, but I am patient and wavering enough when it comes to other people. When it comes to wants. When it comes to giving up for someone else.

There is one virtue in me of which I am fiercely confident in my possession. I'm loyal. I am loyal to the point of excruciating pain and punishment. Loyal to that place where it's unhealthy...where loyalty becomes this chain, this magnet to the iron of my changing. To the iron of me. Drawing me always back to these things that hold me. These things that I just want to pick up and carry with me on toward that moving. On toward that horizon. I can move if I have it. I can move if it stays close.

It's the distance that keeps me wavering around in possible motivations. It's the distance that carves deeper into the walls of that hole...that whole.