Hell. I�ve got this wicked anxiety pressing in on me. The chest pains have returned with a vengeance. All day yesterday I could not catch my breath. I�m worried and thus have not paid my bills. I�m worried that I will never be myself again. It�s not simply a lack of solitude. It�s bigger than that, and maybe it�s a good thing to happen, but from this vantage point, it feels a bit like an invading force coming in and knocking down all my safe houses. I stare at calendars and wonder, when will I have a moment�s peace? Heart rate�s up, labored breathing, the shakes, the chills, the aching back the neck cricks the great collapse.

Tonight is my last time venturing into RCC. I am glad. Thank all the heavens for that.

This weekend: 6 huge bags of trash, the detritus of a life of solitude. 10 years worth of paperwork out the door. I feel lighter and I feel mournful. This is only the beginning. I am not so good with throwing things away. The world spins all away from me and I can�t spin along with it. Instead I fall down. It�s all so melodramatic, isn�t it. Ugh.

It�s ok for me when he�s here. I forget this agony of time barreling forward. On Sunday mornings, my chest starts to pound and I feel like I�m going to throw up. Mondays are terrible, Tuesdays now too because I must dread the traveling, even if it�s not me traveling, I dread the open road, the path ahead, change and indecision and the closing up of old possibilities and even older potential. I want to go back 10 years and I want to say the one right thing that will take me down a different road entirely. I want my life to be a choose-your-own-adventure story.

And the panic of dying has started again. The flash of terror when I stand at the top of the stairs and think, this is it, I�m gone. Oh I never want to be gone.

I want no music, no company save Basho Bashi, no thoughts. But that�s wrong, too. I have had that and hated it. I said to him, I know it is better to long for solitude than to long for company. But I forget to remember that. My mother, who has never lived alone in all her 50 years, she doesn�t believe me when I say this. It is true, I say, and yet I cannot bear other people.

I�m not proud of how hurt I was when he brought clean sheets for my bed and his own towel. I am not proud with how I dealt with that hurt. I held it in for a little while, I tried to reason myself out of it and when that didn�t work I let myself grow angry in my head. I see where the hurt comes from but I don�t know what to do about it. It comes from the small scared loneliest parts of me, the parts that I keep in the safe rooms, the parts that learned a long time ago long and long that I am poor and dirty and boring and not like other people and you shouldn�t invite anyone over or in because they will find out. They will know then. They will see the truth, that I am small and poor and nothing. The fucking sheets, man. That�s where that door got opened and I can�t shut it. I try to be like other people, try to fool folks that I am not who I am, not so small and worried, not that pushover kid, sitting at the lunch table, listening to the other girls sitting all around me saying things about my hair about my clothes (your mother shops at the salvation army doesn�t she? Your mother is a gimp. Do you ever take baths? Oh my god just look at her) and I would just sit there and try to disappear and I think I almost did. I never wanted them to like me never wanted to be friends with such cruel people. What I wanted was to be left alone and safe and invisible. After the rape and the horror and then friends who were not my friends (said sfitz: why did you even hang out with him didn�t you know didn�t you know what he would do) I left. I stopped going to my job and I went to Florida and my mother and my father were safe and I was invisible again and not judged again and not found lacking again. I sat on benches behind buildings and smoked and smoked and just felt how easy it would be to stay there in that little nothing Florida town with only my mother and my father for company, safe, under the palm trees. And there I stayed, not speaking, not anything but numb, for long spring and summer months. Away and alone and safe.

Oh I did not want to write any of that. Shame is the worst of all the sister evils.

It is a hard thing to open my life again for him. I forgot that it would be so hard. To think that this door opened because he has allergies and my house is ever addled with animal hair. It�s ridiculous, no?

The pressure is slightly less now. My god my god. I want that John Donne poem now and so I will read it and I will give it to you:

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearley'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.