It's not really wanting alone time, per se. I mean, the last thing I want to be is alone, which is why this week is hitting me so hard in the first place. It's more of a...I just want to be away from the people who don't fully understand and appreciate me. I don't want to spend time with people who are going to hang out with me and then be so glad they get to run off and do other things with other people who are more important to them.

I dunno. I'm just feeling so bitchy lately, and I feel bitchy because I feel needy, and I feel needy because I feel lonely, and I feel lonely because I am. Ha. Something along those lines...only with far more stuff in the spaces between the periods and the next words. I was cleaning my room this weekend, and I found the old letters that i'd thought I'd lost in the bottom of my desk drawer, and being a girl, I had to do the stupid thing and go back and read them all. And it...walking through all of their old rooms in your heart...the places you lock away and vow you'll never go back to...I walked through them and it ached, tore at me. And it wasn't what was there that did it. It was what once was there.

In the empty spaces between things I read my laughter, and my happiness. Our laughter and happiness, and I sobbed. I was mad at myself. Rereading the stupid things I said and did. I was mad at the person who I was a year ago. I resented her for not seeing what she had, and where she was, for being so self-centered and fake and at the same time being so painfully genuine. I look back now, from a perspective that's been polished and cleared by tears and trials, and I see it for what it was. And part of it for what it could have been. I gave myself to him in the most literal figurative way possible. I cut my heart out and gave it to him, and for a while he held it. For a while he wanted it, and it meant something to him. And I had to take it back, because I saw that both he and it were strained, and that it was my fault, and I thought if I could take it all back and put it all back and patch up the holes, that things would be just as they were.

I was wrong, and I've spent a year reading my mistakes between each stitch of regret, forgiveness, and release. Each seam in the sewing up of an old life to give it a place in this new one. And it's hard, because I didn't know what to do with him then, and I still don't know what to do with him now. He just is. This disjointed part of myself that never quite fit, and that probably never will quite fit...but it's a part that I wanted - and a part that I still want - with me.

Sometimes it's funny how a thing as beautiful as memory can sting you. The burn, the lump in the throat, when you see an old movie, hear an old song. A joke and you laugh, because he would have laughed. Because he would have rolled his eyes. Because he would have seen it with his eyes shining. And I don't get to see it. I don't get to hear it. I don't get to be a part of that as the me I am now. It was with the me who I once was. Who I once tried so hard to be. I don't mourn the loss of her. Or the loss of him. I mourn the loss of something that never was, and what never could be. The loss of redoing something because you think you know what you would have done. What you should have done. The loss of being able to go back and make the now something different. Make it something better, brighter, cleaner...new. The loss of rediscovery. The loss of a friendship, a friend; an opportunity to approach a once-inextricable part of my life with a shiny new sincere comfort in myself.

It's just something that I have to do. I have to go through the rooms. A spring-cleaning of the heart, if you will. I have to take down the pictures and hold them and see them and wonder. I have to dust the shelves, and pull down the books and leaf through them. The memories. The poetry. The conversations. To re-taste, to smell again, to once more finger something I cherished. Something that was an invualuable treasure to me.

I know it probably doesn't make sense, and that you probably don't understand. It's hard for me to understand it myself. But I have to do it. And I have to sit up at night and write about it. To lay awake at three in the morning on a Saturday and remember what I used to do. It's a re-feeling that purges. That purifies. In a way, my going back each time is the way that I have to destroy it enough to let it go. If I return enough, it will lose its novelty. It will lose its meaning. It's value. And when I no longer have to go back, because it means nothing to me, then I can let it go. Familiarity breeds contempt...I must make myself once again familiar with my ghosts, so I resent them enough to no longer cry when they leave me.