“And I know, none of this will matter in the long run // but I know a sound is still a sound around no one // and while I’m in this body // I want somebody to want // and I want what I want // and I want you to love me”

– Fiona Apple, I Want You To Love Me

Stuck in this cycle. Ups and downs, and I cannot make either of them last. I feel suspended in myself. The blows cannot sink me any lower if I never pick myself back up. If I do not allow myself to believe good things will happen, I will not be upset when they are only passing through. Every attempt is a waste. To muster up hope, as I have done these past few months, is confounding. I must learn to accept fact. There is nothing redeemable that I can offer to anyone, nothing purposeful I can provide, nothing I should expect in return.

But yet. There is this nasty, pathetic little thing in me that cries out still. To seek love is the natural human condition, but I must teach this thing that it is unnatural for me. It must be unnatural, because how can I offer everything that I have, more than I know I should, and it still not be enough for someone to want me? I want so often, so intensely, that everyone must, too. How can their want avoid me every single time? It seems so unlikely, so unlucky.

I do not think there can be anything casual about offering yourself to someone. I am somehow both so emotionally disconnected from it and so tuned in that I cannot stand it. Maybe because I cannot fathom that these emotions belong to me – I act on someone else’s will, someone else’s desire, because I cannot understand my own. I would like to. All that I seek now is a pure physical desire, for me to place my form in front of someone else and for them to want to do something to it. Love me, hurt me, dream of me, pretend with me. Anything at all. Anything. Can I be so hideous that no one will ever want me for the sake of wanting me? It brings that awful tightness to my throat to think of, but it must be true. I am living it over and over and over. To deny it would be sinful.

How silly I must look. Alone in my studio apartment, crumpled on the floor, hunched over my computer, unable to pull in a singular deep breath, telling this to the only thing I can. How do you bother the people you love with this? I want them to keep loving me, so I must offer it to you and hope that it will mean something. I’ve handed you an image of me on a silver platter. My legs are going numb in my efforts to bow to you. Trembling, pathetic. Horribly alone.

G.D.