People are just people.

I can't sleep. There are girls on my floor singing songs from The Little Mermaid. My mind and body feel like they've been working in the coal mines for decades. Where do all these aches come from? Why can't I stop crying? I took three ibuprofen to numb it, and maybe I'll take some more soon. When I was ten I got unbearable aches in my legs that kept me up at night. Dad said they were growing pains. FUCK that. I'm too old to feel my bone cells crack and expand. I can rub my legs with my elbows, which intensifies the pain but also helps to relieve some of that internal tension. It feels a bit like homesickness.

It will benefit you to know that I am slowly learning my own tactics and soon I will be able to master and eventually overcome them.

It will not benefit you to know that my eyelashes have been wet and that I have deleted hundreds of very important letters -- erased, infact, all traces of an entire imaginary relationship with a non-existent humanoid -- and felt a peppery blend of freedom and grief. The more times I said "don't call" the more times I meant "please do." You would never have guessed these facts on your own. My divulgence incites a suspicion that I can feel over the cyber-waves.

On dreams.

Thursday night I reached lucidity and wanted to do what I could never mention in real life.

Friday night I dreamed I had a lover who shot me in my in the thigh and then shot himself three times, until he died. I put his body on the carpet near the back door of our old house. I called 9-1-1 later and told the dispatcher not to bother using the siren when they came because I didn't want to disturb the neighbors. I could feel his disembodied tongue in my mouth.

Oh man.

Pandora's box.

I caught the plague. So far it is treating me well.... perhaps even better than I treat myself. But I am often reminded of the boy on the stairs and how if I tried to say anything at all I'd end up wearing my trachea's yellow-green lining on my sleeve.

I had sticky ink under my fingernails so I cut them off with scissors. I wished I still had the bubble gum pink, bear shaped plastic brush that was always sitting by the kitchen sink. Now I'm going back to the printmaking studio to soothe my pounding head with the sound of steel on zinc.

Robot sex.