i dont know what it is but i am faced with crippling disability when i put myself down to something i always thought i wanted to do. like this. maybe it is that the anticipation in itself has substituted my want for the whole. and so it is with the other things. often the only satisfaction i get is only perceived future satisfaction - past the anticipation and anything else after that is a big letdown. so, now i am back to the point with crippling disability, because this is where i start writing and meaning.

smack in the middle of the year. i am still stewing in my cauldron except this time things are holding together in a way i couldnt imagine a year ago. but still i am boiling in my own juices, my never's and nowhere's. this year i turn eighteen and already i can see myself dying. i am terribly frightened of being an adult - even the clothes, they are too warm. i am not unfamiliar with many parts of adulthood. i have known many yes-and-buts, been stuck in too many never-and nowhere's. i have been wrung dry of the yes-or-no that i so desperately believed in, at least i think so. there has been too much, and i am sure all the damage is showing.

right now the one thing i want most is to talk to daryl, strangely enough. its been three years since and i havent seen him in one, talked to him in three. but then i remember that lynnette messaged me last week, and i see all the hyphens stringing through words. they reach out into my future like the living branches of plath's fig tree and strangle my vain hopes for love. the best i can do now is to anticipate that day. then that will be the time when i am again unable to live with myself and if i am lucky i will be in the state i am in now. already i can see myself having to live every single day until the one where i die.

  I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.
     From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America...and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
     I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.  I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. Plath, The Bell Jar