Here are the things that are hard.
Daytime.
Outofbedtime.
Using my voice.
Using my voice and making it loud enough for you to hear.
Using my voice, making it loud, and trusting that you will notice me.
Being noticed.
Trusting you to notice me, and look at me, and see me for who I am.
Trusting you (I don't)
Florescent lights.
Wide open spaces.
Eye contact.

Here are the things that are not hard.
Being clean.
Chicken soup.
Dark time.
Sitting outside in the quiet dark time, breathing in cold air and second hand smoke.
Sitting outside on a concrete step.
Sitting outside, with you.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend, I think she's a friend. At the very least, a person who I admire and enjoy talking to. She was telling me about a girl who was causing trouble for the people around her.
A girl who was sick, and wasn't paying her rent, and was hiding in her room, and only coming out at night. Who cried when people were kind, and screamed when they tried to make her face reality.
And all I could think was, she sounds like the girl I used to be.
I said this, and my friend said "But you're awesome".
Extract some lies, and add on a night where everything falls apart, a night that looks like blood, and metal and a black coat that I never wore again.
A failed relationship, a refusal to let go.
I wasn't always awesome.

I haven't been writing things lately.
 I'm so cold, and my fingers seem to have frozen stiff.
 I think if I'm not careful they might snap right off.
 No seriously. I have the heat turned up so high right now, I should be able to close my eyes and convince myself that I'm sitting in a sub tropical environment. I should be sweaty and damp and overheated and removing articles of clothing.
But even with my eyes closed, I can tell that my hands are purple-grey-blue. And my knuckles white-white. They jut through my papery thin skin like exposed bone.
I've been thinking things instead, and half muttering them under my breath as I stomp through dark streets.
My boots on the pavement mark time. Slam poetry for one.
The rhythm feels so good, much better than simply finding the right words. I prefer to spit words out under pressure, between steamy push outs of air. It doesn't matter so much that they are right, I just can't miss the beat.
They are living words. And when I try to press them to paper, I can't remember a single one.

I can't think of anything to write lately. What little mental energy I have, is being sucked up into essay writing and forcing myself to read Just One More Chapter of the Iliad.
I think, honestly I wanted to take a Classics paper because it sounded smart and intimidating.
And then maybe people would think that I was smart and if not intimidating maybe, noticeable.
I've developed a mouse complex.
Really I could have taken another English Literature paper, and enjoyed it. But now I have paid a ridiculous amount of money, and it's too late to withdraw and I just have to keep going.

I found an old notebook of mine yesterday, and spent a while trying to decipher my handwriting. When I wrote in it I was very, very sad. And reading it, I felt strange. Feeling the memory of a hurt, was like trying to negotiate a ghost limb.
I went through and wrote myself notes in the margins.
Dear Beth, it stops hurting.
Dear Beth, there's a lot of love in your life now.
Dear Beth, it gets better.

I think I miss you.
And this is not a good thing.
And this is not an honest thing.
This is not a thing that leaves me lying peacefully in my bed, while she sleeps beside me, our joined hands clasped tight, and our joined breath condensing on the ceiling to fall in droplets on our faces when the air cools.
This is not a thing that lets me kiss her with open lips.
This is a thing that fills me with bitter taste.
And makes me hope, that this  is just the result of premenstrual syndrome.
A particularly bad bout.
And makes me hope,
that this is not a true thing.
This is a thing that ruins my grammar, ruins my peace less mind.

We walked around the gravel lots, hand in hand, peering through the windows of dispossessed houses.
It was dusk. We passed signs that said HAZARD CONSTRUCTION AUTHORIZED PERSONAL and you helped me up into the doorway. The floor was split in two, we stepped carefully.
Skeleton walls and gutted out rooms, I was a little bit frightened.
Even though it was just a house. Less filled with ghosts than piles of plywood and abandoned paint tins.

They like to say that we are post feminist.
That men and women are equal, that we have nothing to fear anymore.
Nothing to really be angry about.
And I can never find the words to disagree.
People like that, who like to make clever sounding, dismissive statements, always want the right words.
As if a lapse of grammar, or an inability to cite sources can render an opinion null and void.
How can I say to people like these, people who care more for glib epigrams than real emotion, that now, when I hear about a rape-
I used to feel sick and horrified and angry and hot and cold all over-
But now, I feel sick and angry, and grateful.
That it has never happened to me.
And then I feel guilty.
And then I feel apprehensive, because maybe it just hasn't happened yet
So you can tell me I'm wrong, that I don't order my arguments coherently.
You can tell me that "null and void" is cliched, and ask me if I even comprehend what it means.
But you can't tell me that I'm safe, to walk alone at night.