like a rubber band until you pull too hard

...

I beg you to press
your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me,
but just so—just so I can almost see your face—

---

my greatest accomplishment over the last year has been to wrap my heart in a blanket of thorns - loosely at first, then tighter and tighter, until every motion has been dampened and every heartbeat has been silenced

2018-2023 was peak extraversion, meeting and talking and keeping in touch with far too many people, arms fraying as i tried to hold onto everyone. probably it was me making up for a childhood of relative isolation or the natural result of finally learning how to hold conversations or something else along those lines. in any case i spent most of 2024 profoundly uninterested in new people. it was a welcome change, but i probably went too far, eg. lots of fun guests pass through the house i live in and i basically ignored most of them. i am currently relearning how to be interested in strangers

charitably, you could say i had no bandwidth and was focusing on myself and the people i already knew. uncharitably, you could say i’d gotten hooked on the strongest substances i’d ever encountered, pure camaraderie and joy being poured into my veins, and i’d forgotten the need for anything else. lately i’ve been getting glimpses of what afterwards looks like - a bit duller, a bit sadder, but i guess life goes on? and that was unimaginable to me just a few months prior

i often forget that i am both incredibly fragile and incredibly robust. fragile in the sense that i cry a lot and feel extremely bad on many days, robust in the sense that in the long run i can manage almost anything. funny how my female friends tend to only understand the fragility and my male friends tend to only understand the robustness. i think it’s really hard to see both sides clearly

sometimes i feel like i don’t have enough of a will to live on my own. meaning: little things like decorating my room and organizing the plushies on my bed and putting the grapes in the freezer all get done because i live with friends and sometimes have guests over, but all those processes would eventually fall into disrepair if i were alone and i would simply give up? in any case i think life is more fun when witnessed by someone else because ordinary actions acquire meanings that they wouldn’t if i were alone. my favorite sound to fall asleep to is the soft breathing of a close friend (raindrops come in second). my current biggest fear is that in 10 years i’ll have no friends because they’ll all be busy with marriages and kids or something

Sam looked at her outstretched hand, which he knew as well as any hand except his own---the precise pattern of the lines that made up the grid of her palm, the slim fingers with the purplish veins at the knuckles, the particular creamy olive hue of her skin, her delicate wrist, pinkish, with a penumbral callus that must have come from Dov, the white gold bracelet she wore that he knew had been a gift from Freda on her twelfth birthday. How could she honestly think he wouldn't know about the handcuffs? He had spent hours sitting next to her, playing games and then making them, staring at her hands as her fingers flew across a keyboard or jabbed at a controller. Tell me I don't know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don't know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.