You say the hill's too steep to climb. Climbing. You say you'd like to see me try. Climbing. You pick the place and I'll choose the time, and I'll climb the hill in my own way. Just wait a while for the right day. And as I rise above the treeline and the clouds, I look down, hearing the sound of the things you said today.

Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd. Smiling. Merciless, the magistrate turns 'round. Frowning.
And who's the fool who wears the crown? Go down in your own way. And every day is the right day. And as you rise above the fearlines in his brow, you go down, hear the sound of the faces in the crowd.

Do I feel fearless? I've been wondering this week, weaving thought around the subtle difference between a lack of fear and the overwhelming presence of apathy. I think that I have the latter, mostly. And in the apathy, I lost my fear. Or, rather, I can't feel it. I don't care to.

My emotional body has been numbed, and I'm not sure why. I had such a rushed past month of overwhelming emotion, striving, I think, for a semblance of some good thing in all the crap that kept hitting me, and something in me broke. Or closed. Or decided that the occasional good thing wasn't worth all of the garbage...it's easier to feel nothing than to work so hard trying to feel good. Or at least, better.

Especially when it doesn't come.

Don't ask me to leave you and turn back. I will go where you go and live where you live. your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.

Do you know what else I've been pondering? Loyalty. Not in the smarmy, buy-a-bumper-sticker-for-my-country, sports-fan-enthusiasm, go-my-alma-mater kind of way. I mean loyalty in...love. But not like that. Not love-love, but..compassion? It goes beyond that. Not charity, not goodwill, not concern. It's...loyalty that I have a problem with. Goethe once said, "He who does not feel his friends to be the world to him, does not deserve that the world should hear of him." And I do, girl howdy, I do. And none of them seem to understand the depth of what I can give, what I do give.

I cannot help it. If it's asked, I will give it. But oh, the agony of spending so much of life giving away yourself with such unwilled, yet hapless, abandon, and then to wonder why it never seems returned to you in quite equal measure.

There are just some of us who, inexplicably, have this gargantuanly proportioned capacity to give and love and be. I don't know why, I don't know how. I can't hope to explain it clear enough for you to understand. (But then, understanding is such a irregular, immeasurable thing.)

I don't know. The more I think about my unconscious willingness to exasperate myself with such violent loyalty to the people I care about who number in spades, the more I wonder if it's me trying so desperately to give people something to need me for, because I wonder, to myself in darker moments, if I'm worth having. If I give people any semblance of value, when I see so little of it inside of me. I can love you, it's the one thing that I know how to give. I have to love you, because it's easier to emanate love outward, than try and find the small space inside of me that's not willing to hold any part of it for me.

If you need me for it, then you will keep me here. And I like to be kept. It's the one thing that I want, really. People who will just keep me.

This is the story of your red right ankle and how it came to meet your leg. And how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangled, and how the skin was softly shed. And how it whispered “Oh, adhere to me, for we are bound by symmetry and whatever differences our lives have been we together make a limb.”

This is the story of your red right ankle.

This is the story of your gypsy uncle you never knew ‘cause he was dead, and how his face was carved and rift with wrinkles in the picture in your head. And remember how you found the key to his hide-out in the Pyrenees? But you wanted to keep his secret safe, so you threw the key away. This is the story of your gypsy uncle.

This is the story of the boys who loved you, who love you now and loved you then. And some were sweet, some were cold and snuffed you, and some just laid around in bed. Some had crumbled you straight to your knees; did it cruel, did it tenderly. Some had crawled their way into your heart to rend your ventricles apart. This is the story of the boys who loved you.

This is the story of your red right ankle.

I think that's the hardest thing that I've had to deal with lately, as far as the whole Su-Dan marriage fiasco goes. Dan was my best friend, for the first time I had given myself, my friendship, my concern, everything completely, wholly, genuinely. And then had to watch it all cast aside. He knew that if anything happened with him and her, that we could never be the same kind of friends, and he did it anyway.

And that, most of all, has been the hard bit to swallow, that me - real, sincere, seriously vulnerable me - was worth so little to him. It's like being flayed open with a knife that you gave them. I handed him all of my insecurity, and he used it to peel me open, and show my fears and doubt back to me in a way that has, for all intents and purposes, nearly crippled me with a loss of..confidence? No, mostly just a loss at the desire to be so open again. I have to retreat into hiding, and wait for my skin to grow back.

But then, I seem to go through this every time.

And that is what I mean. All this giving, this loving people. It's work.

Oh, how it's work.

Shut out, pimpled and angry, I quietly tied all my guts into knots. I gave up trying to make them, figured it'd take them too long to look up. Besides, it was undeniably clear to me. I don't know why. When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters, I knew what worthless dregs we all are then.

Lucked out, found my favorite records lying in wait at the Birmingham mall. The songs that I heard, the occasional book were the only fun that I ever took, and I thought I would make it myself. Yeah, the trick is just making yourself. But when they're parking their cars on your chest, you still have a view of the summer sky to make it hurt twice, when your restless body caves to its whim and suddenly struggles to take flight.

Three-thousand miles northeast I left all my friends at the morning bus stop, shaking their heads, "What kind of life d'you dream of? You're allergic to love..." "Yes, I know, but I must say in my own defense it's been undeniably dear, I don't know why."

When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters, I knew the worthless dregs we are, the selfless loving saints we are, the melting, sliding dice we've always been...

I mean, come on, the best laid plans of mice aft gang aglae...