Different Version of Me.

My body has finally had enough.









Whatever bug is going around these days has totally found me and i feel ickly. sickly. gross. ickly. sickly.











I made the mistake of going to the Bronx today (hair appointment) despite feeling like crap and I am paying the price. Because the weather has been spring like, i wore a very light jacket. No scarf. No gloves. No hat. Of course today it was freezing out. windy and cold. Now i feel worse than I did when i woke up.


I've been a little tense these last few weeks with everything that is going on with my life. I can't say I'm sleeping or eating well these days. Yesterday I may have only had a pop tart and soda. I simply go from feeling hungry all the time to 'did i eat...who forgets if they ate'. And on the sleep end, I'm getting little of it though i am always in bed. Last night was the first night I've actually managed to sleep with the lights off. The silence and darkness still terrify me (and there isn't a cute boy next to me to distract me) so i usually keep my TV on the Disney channel until i pass out.


My body is just exhausted and I think that is why I'm feeling under the weather.


The store has cut hours drastically and I am working two days next week. TWO! Luckily, or surprisingly, I'm doing okay with money (and may have a new job in the works!) so I look forward to my light week and sleeping /watching netflix and trying to get better next week in more ways than one I guess.







I've been feeling really conflicted by everything lately. On the bus/train/walk home I realized that in 4 weeks, I'll be turning 26. It'll be the first birthday without Marie, who made a point of always being the first to call me at midnight. I'll also be the same age that she was when she decided to end her life. This birthday will be weird. There is no way around it.







Since she died, everything i thought i wanted for my life at 25/26 has completely changed. What I want for myself and what I want from the people in my life has new meaning. It's weird. Occasionally I'll check the stat features on this blog and I find it very interesting that one of the most read entries is the one I wrote about turning 20 ('the perks of being 20' i called it). I wrote that post more five years ago and i still get comments on it. I only bring it up because at 20 i remember wanting to have everything figured out. I wanted to be this mature person who had relationships and goals in check.





Now the only thing I want is to be happy even though 'happy' is this new thing. I'm okay not having everything figured out. I'm okay trying to find what I'm passionate about. I'm happy spending my mornings sewing or dancing or singing loudly. The anxiety about 'myself' has lessened. But i worry, that now that the world and experiences I'm ready to be apart of have all but abandoned me. Especially since I've spent so much time shunning it.

Like when Sean made me that stupid vampire stake (am i just being a dumb stupid school girl or was his gesture as sweet as i think it is? Because I'm smitten by the whole gift to be honest), which I have since kept on my desk and stared at from afar in awe and confusion...I thought in my romantic state 'I'd like to date a thoughtful boy like that(who was, um, single). I'd like to be in a relationship where i could be strange and unusual. I'd like to be loved and understood by someone who would make me a vampire stake because he had the resources too'.


But i fear that I'll never feel like I deserve those things. Even now, I feel stupid for liking the gift so much because, often, i feel like a girl like me doesn't deserve it. Marie's death has felt like a rejection of my (our) weirdness ever being anything someone could love and endure. This is what makes me angry at her for killing herself. Sure the pain and grief are unbearable. Sure there are days when I am completely blindsided by the fact that she isn't here. But mainly I'm upset because my better half's death is like a rejection of how proud I thought we were to be different and complicated and unique.

Because I was (am) finally coming around to my strangeness. and introversion. and complications. And I was (am) finally starting to be okay with that. But i don't know how to allow people into my world especially since the one and main person who occupied it is no longer here. She was my champion of weird. We'd talk for hours about how frustrating it was to be outsiders but how we were going to prove to ourselves that our version of life was more interesting.

But with her suicide I suddenly have to learn how to be okay with my strange ways alone and try to find people to relate too while also learning to accept the people who love me just as I am.

My version of happiness, these days, is rooted in my attempt to feel worthy of the good that comes into my life. To know that i can make my vision of my future this tangible and maybe lovely thing. That I can have a career all my own that i enjoy. I can have boy all my own whose hair I can ruffle. I can have friends who enjoy playing scrabble and reading nerdy books. I can have all these things, i tell myself everyday. I can. Because i want them more than anything else. But it doesn't mean that i am not anxious about my sudden desire (and need) to create something out the hole that she's left. Not because I want to fill her space but because I don't have a choice but to.

I'm different. That's a fact. The changes stare back at me from the mirror. It's me you see, same eyes and nose and mouth, but altered in some way that i just can't pinpoint. And if i could make peace with the girl I've was then in order to grasp this girl I'm becoming, I'd feel less torn by everything. And less exhausted.

But alas, that's where the tension and conflict arise.