Matryoshka69’s Weblog

  What the fuck is bulimia? An illness desperately in need of treatment or a self-induced moment of weakness spent heaving over the toilet? Whose fault is it- Angelina Jolie’s legs or my frivolous desire for my body to mimic hers? 

   It’s listening to the water running for another twenty minutes while snot accumulates below your nose. It’s hoping your roommate is really as asleep as her snoring leads you to believe so you won’t have to answer her stares over breakfast. Or her judgmental disappointment and discomfort around you. Or the disappointment and discomfort you imagine she’s feeling… because that’s what you would feel in her shoes. It’s when you keep trying despite the chafing in your esophagus because when you shift to wipe your face, your legs jiggle a little. It’s always being conscious of how and where your body moves. You never feel solid enough.

  It’s always feeling hungry. And then feeling fat. And never fitting quite well enough into your clothes, because you are so soft around the hips. It’s feeling a rush of relief as your stomach violently turns inside out. It’s having the moisture sucked right out of your cheeks and your forehead stretching red and tight. It’s crouching with your knees on the icy tile floor, wondering when you will get multi-system failure. When your lung will rupture and fill with your last meal. When the cancer cells will begin to form. And not stopping. It’s shame in knowing that you’d rather die than feel disgusting in your skin. It’s deciding if you should take the easy way and blame “the media”, or blame yourself for giving in to what you hate.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  gartok and i have this inside joke about “the hippopotapenis”. it’s one of those things you don’t remember the origins of, but you find it extremely funny when it comes up (and really dumb when you think about how it sounds). he wrote a song about it. i wonder if he sings it to other people and expects them to laugh. unlikely. i don’t know if i want him to make that inside joke between us public. he asked me for permission to write a song about me. why the hell not? later on in my life, when i have a smoker’s cough and have changed my name to Carol, i’ll hear it on the radio. he’ll be “a sleazy millionaire” with five catchy hit songs, and he’ll have fished that one out because my name’s almost as interesting as, but not as overdone as “delilah”. then i’ll tap my ten year old on the shoulder and say “yeh, that was me. that girl in da song.” i can see the scene in my head and it is in a garish, sad sepia tone. but we’re really little bumps in each other’s lives.

 anyway, i can’t wait to go to his show tomorrow. it’ll be fun to go out again.

  i spoke with stef today. mind if i call him by an informal moniker? if i don’t have the right to, please stop me. no? ok. for now i’ll just pretend we had a conversation the way we used to. not that i remember much the way we used to converse. isn’t it strange that as soon as we stop communicating with someone directly, as soon as we file them into a place that says “memories”, we begin to forget how they really were? i just remember the general, perfect feeling of being with him. i remember warmth and closeness. but no, i neither expected nor received that feeling from him. well, maybe in little accidental spurts. he’s definitely trying to keep me at bay. 

  i was really put to the test just now. i learned to feel so secure with myself lately. the whole time we were talking, though, i felt like i was trying to prove something. my newfound confidence? some newfound maturity? especially after he told me i am the same person i was. well, that would make anyone below the age of fifty try to prove him otherwise. it is very possible that i only feel like he successfully kept me at a distance and asserted himself as a completely seperate unit because i let him make that impression on me.

  if i think about this anymore, i’ll end up trying too hard. i’m acting like my old self around him, because that’s the only way i know how to interact with him. but there will be no purposeful pushing him away. he can dance around me the way he likes, because if both of us do it we’ll end up scratching each other up. we can’t both mark our territory again in the same space. we’re two seperate people, after all.

  i miss him. i hope he slides out of his shell again.

fever crawls through my skin

warms my eyes, colors my cheeks

settles in my forehead

the blood is boiling but chill to the touch

my throat itches and my neck burns

perspiration beads on my chest

uncomfortably

my body heat is suffocating me under the blanket

it’s like sharing my bed

with an overheating man, but I

can’t kick him out or move to the cooler corner.

my ears are ringing the way a door buzzer might, quietly

but i’m alone;

i’m angry

and my body is not cooperating

it’s not responding the way i want it to

it’s no comort to me,

because it’s stewing along with me

a sweaty, faithful, stupid dog

its paws spread askew over my belly.

the hot lemon tea soothes my glands,

its warmth tranquilizing.

I close my eyes,

excited for the dreams that might come.

now my mom’s in the hospital. my god,  i have this horrible feeling. she’s always sick because she’s so stressed, and she won’t let anyone help her.  she’s such a freaking go-getter. ever since i was little, i was afraid she was going to get cancer. it was always a bizarre and unfounded feeling.

i should be terrified, but i’m sucked dry right now. i can’t stand to think of her in pain. we’ve always been there for each other, pulling ourselves through. ever since my dad and brother passed away (sorry, “died”- i forget not to be p.c) i’ve been very calm about death. as in, the deaths of others, my own death, the deaths of my loved ones, etc. but i’m not supposed to lose her. i’m getting ahead of myself. she’ll be ok. when i don’t know what’s going on my imagination runs away with me. i’ll worry about these things when the doctors find out what’s wrong.

god, i don’t want her to be in pain. she’s in so much pain lately. and she feels worthless and frustrated because she wants to work, and run, and be active; not lie in a hospital bed and be taken care of.

actually, today I woke up feeling like a brand-new person.  the sky was blue, the breeze was nice. i didn’t sleep at all but i put on some red lipstick when i went out (because i felt like it, lipstick!) and people looked at me like a freaking movie star. i studied, and i finally went to the financial aid office. tomorrow i can finally sign up for the loan i’ve been meaning to get for four months. i went to the church on lexington (they like me there because i’m jewish, and that obviously makes me interesting) and breathed in the woody, stony church smell. then i walked out and was immediately accosted by two hippies who asked me to join greenpeace. which i did, bitches. then, just for good measure, i dropped my cell phone into a sewer grate. the corner hot dog men and construction workers immediately swarmed the vicinity to try prying it out with a big metal stick. i didn’t even ask them for help, and they literally rallied to the rescue! i ran to the bank to get some cash to buy fly paper to stick onto the metal thing, and when i came back there were, i shit you not, no less than twelve guys crowding the grate and prying it open with a crowbar. i don’t even know how they got a crowbar. i tried buying them all hot dogs and they wouldn’t have it. one opportunist said he wouldn’t mind a hot dog and the crew almost beat him up. just to desintegrate all the hatred i’ve been harboring for this city. i love new york.

i’m going to move to india to massage the lepers. i’ve already decided.

 why the fuck is it that people have to be jolted out of their skulls to appreciate anything at all? it’s fucking ridiculous, really. so S’s sister almost died friday, and i had no idea until today. from someone else. when i stopped hyperventilating and made sure she was going to be ok, my first thought was: why didn’t he tell me? since when did i stop being his comfort and his softness? i know the answer to that. and i can’t do anything about it. then i called his parents, and they said she is ok and is already miraculously able to sit up and talk to them for a few minutes. god bless those positive people, honestly. they were really ok when i talked to them on the phone. i love them so much.

i hate myself for feeling helpless. i really do. it doesn’t fucking MATTER at ALL that i feel jealous and desperate knowing that i should have been there for him seconds after he found out, doing what i had prepared myself to do those years we were together. since when did i become bad for him? i know the answer to that.

scrap everything. just scrap everything. ankita and i went on my roof and destroyed things. we lived tonight. we didn’t care that the cat man in the next building yelled at us for accidentally hitting his window with a smashed cookie. we made it literally rain angel hair pasta, and then we burned it and made it crunch deliciously like brittle little bones when our boots stomped on the big pile. it was wonderful. i’ve never been that angry in my life. but tonight, i raged and raged. i let myself scream from the pit; a big, juicy scream that probably woke up everyone in the neighborhood. big deal, you really can’t ever get any privacy around here. nothing matters except the feelings we have now. and what we are left with at the end. it’s so true,  no matter how cliche it is. all that matters is that we find out what makes us happy, and do it. what’s anything worth, especially our struggles, if we can’t pinpoint when we felt alive and ourselves?