This Is A Message To You
<<2004-08-21 - 1:45 a.m.>>

I have, now, for reasons that shall go undiscussed, that (resurrected) longing for the One Other Person, the one with whom I can totally let down my guard. I need a balance between style and substance (slick, soulless irony and dull, blunt earnestness). I don't know whether I want to be the kind of woman who wears Chanel as a matter of course or the kind of woman who drinks wine out of mugs with her starving-artist friends for the rest of her life. (This is a statement of confusion.) I don't know why I hold things against people when I do, and don't when I don't. I don't know who I am or who I want to be or how I feel about that lack of knowledge or about that statement of that lack of knowledge. I most certainly don't know how I feel about being on medical leave. What am I if not a student failing to live up to her prodigious potential?

I want, a little bit, to run back to Germany, where I stopped being afraid of Moira and learned about walking by myself through streets where I don't have the words with which to articulate my image of myself, where I am the screen and not the projector. As the screen, I had no control over what people thought about me. I was maybe three-fifths of a human being, voiceless, without nuanced opinions or depth of expression. I was a body and a horrifyingly mimetic thought process. And what I had to do was accept the passivity of that, divide the perception from myself. I never succeeded, but learning that I have to do that is something amazing. I have to do that. Separate your perception of me from mine.

I want to be better friends with Leah.

I want to start a magazine that will magnetize others of my particular aesthetic problem to me.

I want an older boyfriend, sort of an inherently cynical thing to have, but also I think possibly the only sort of person who would tolerate my latent tendency toward total wide-eyed articulate confusion.

P.S. There's nothing I can do about what you think of me. That's mostly your concern.

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