real time, zoe, anxiety.

You were quite average on the telephone, which of course is not average at all, or maybe just the new average.

I hate thinking of you as a boy.

She is not as pretty in real life, as she used to be.

I want to scream and chew things and kiss everyone I meet.

the brightness of my irises does nothing to reassure me

i can't talk anymore.

There is blood. There is blood on my face and between my thighs, but nowhere I want it to be. I keep picturing lines on my wrist and my thigh and my ankles and my neck and my back but I wasn't picturing the pink tinges when they appeared on the tissue paper this afternoon, that spelled doom for my appointment on Friday, and a quiet end to one of the more illogical things I've ever pretended not to want. But there is a blackness in the quiet, a final wall slamming down, the very last point shoved off a cliff. (I think of your arm between my breasts, your fingertips resting lightly but oh-so-obviously against the most prominent scar left on my chest. You sought it out and set your fingers there, you knew exactly where to find it, calculated inventory of the lines on my skin. "'Cause I don't like feelin' 'um in my sleep!" You can lie with your eyes and with your lips. It was cold but I understood it. You can lie with your eyes and your lips but take your goddamned hands off my scars. It was the worst thing you could ever do [question mark].) Things are shutting down. The new doctor with her thick, unplaceable accent said that otherwise, I was completely healthy. I was too tired to laugh.

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, edited for time and content, sent me into a frenzy in the middle of the night, stumbling through the house in panic. It was me on the lawn, in the rain, with the belt. A different little boy with marks on his pale skin. I had to find your words, written through my hand, the back page of a journal, an old memory, and repeat them over and over to myself, trying to remember your voice, until my lungs could accept the oxygen, instead of just sucking it in so fast it made me dizzy. Kissing my little sister on the cheek to silently scream to the Universe that I would've been okay.

I say too much and wonder who's eyes still come here. And grammar. I wonder about grammar.

I am sorry that all I am is pain, lately.

what if I can't do it without you?

My not-so-happy knees...

...are feeling slightly happier these days. The swelling has almost completely disappeared, and I can walk normally again! I only have trouble with stairs, standing up sometimes, and bending them real far, like to crouch down or sit on my knees. What a relief!

The MRI showed no tears in any of the ligaments, only that my menisci (more than one meniscus, cartilage disks in your knees that keep the bones in your thighs from scraping against the bones in your lower legs) had gotten knocked out of place because of all the swelling. Yikes. The best news is that my bloodwork came back NEGATIVE for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Wahoo! They couldn't find anything else in my blood, only that I had a sed rate that was OFF the charts. Sedimentation rate is a non-specific indicator of inflammation in the body. Normal is 0-20. If you get pneumonia or a really bad infection it might go up to thirty, and my doctor says you pretty much NEVER see it go higher than 40. Mine was 83. Woohoo, medical oddity.

Anyway, I'm back visiting my parents again, and I've got an appointment with a rheumatologist in Columbus on Monday, as she thinks it's still some type of arthritis. Best case scenario would be a temporary thing that sometimes happens after you get sick; your body just gets sort of confused and attacks your joints, but once it goes away you're off scott-free. THAT would be good. Especially because I was sick the week before Mystery Diagnosis: Angela's Knees began, so I've got my fingers crossed for that. Meanwhile, I'm on Prednisone, which seems to be prescribed for a wide range of disorders and sort of confuses me, but it seems to be helping, so I'm okay with that.

Best reaction so far came from Ian/Ian of 16th Street fame, the morning after the ominous Pi Party: "I have arthritis! ...I've been playing soccer since I was four." He asked lots of questions and seemed genuinely concerned, while his evil counterpart Adam Rose merely accepted 1000mg of Vicodin and booted me out the door with a few obligatory statements. But, that's a completely separate riff which has very few ties to my knees.

Gyno appointment on Friday and wisdom teeth removal in a few weeks... I haven't been to the doctor this much since I was in high school doing my MDD stint. Hope this one has a better ending, although I can't say I'm expecting a whole lot...

P.S. As it turns out, I didn't have to remove any of my jewelry for the MRI! You have no idea how relieved I was. Yay, at least one good thing!

If I Can't Get a Plastic Retainer for My Neck Piercing.....I Will Punch Candi to Relieve My Intense Anger

My knees (especially my left one) are just an absolute black hole for injury. It began this summer when I made an accidental, drunken drop to my knees on the deck of the Strasse Haus, and then walked around with bruises for a week or so. Later in the summer there followed the infamous disgusting, pus-y open wound that I obtained when my friends jerked me away from some guy that I'd recently hit in the face, causing me to trip over...something in City Park and pretty much eat shit, ripping my sister's purple fishnets that I was wearing and losing a significant amount of skin in the process. Yes, I was also drunk at the time. (Upon seeing me limp into the house with my big, fluid-leaking injury, my dear, concerned sister screeched, "You broke my fishnets?!") Then I fell out of Katelin's car while I was visiting the girls in Nashville last month. Onto asphalt. Ouch.

Okay...maybe they are just a black hole for drunken injury. In any case, they've struck again, this time without any help from chez vodka.

Both knees have been very painful and swollen for about three weeks, seemingly for no reason, as I can't remember doing anything that would have hurt them this badly. It's to the point where I've been limping around the house, occasionally on crutches, with intermittent tears over the pain. I can't stand up without serious help. I feel like I'm 80. So today I had a doctor's appointment to get them checked out. She didn't know what to make of it (it's always fun to hear the doctor going, "That is so weird! Wow! I have no idea! Weird!" *sarcasm*) and sent me down for blood tests and x-rays. Well, this was after she mused that it could possibly be rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. That's pretty rare, though, she said, unaware that I have quite the knack for landing on the wrong side of the statistics. That's why I have a blog. Or something like that. Anyway, seven vials of blood and eight x-rays later, we bopped off to the pharmacy to fill my prescription for the lovely, lovely Vicodin. I have an MRI scheduled for Monday.

I am nineteen years old. I absolutely refuse to have arthritis.

Boston

A town in Massachusetts where one of my best friends grew up. (She's the most normal person I've ever met that's from Massachusetts.) Also a song by some band called Augustana that I should really, really stop listening to.

It's sad as shit and makes me want to cry. It's not really in the lyrics so much as it's in the music. It's beautiful and awful.

It makes it sound so hopeful that moving would make me feel better. But I know from experience that this isn't true. Sure, it can help a lot (i.e. my emigration from Delaware). But your demons are extremely travel-compatible, and, unlike Kevin McCallister, are impossible to leave behind. So it doesn't really matter.

I wish it was that simple. I wish moving cross-country would fix me. I'm exhausted and I hate thinking that maybe nothing will ever be able to make it any better. This song just makes me think about all that. Why do I torture myself?

_________


Last night I was laying in bed and was hit suddenly by this awful wave of missing sleeping with you. I just wanted so badly for you to appear and crawl into bed next to me and for everything that's happened the past couple months to just be erased. Then I cried and tried to stick myself with a safety pin. It was supposed to be this combined accomplishment of physical pain ('cause I'm so fucking sick of being so hurty on just the inside) and my eighth-grade-science-fair desire to poke a whole in my swollen knee to see if fluid will spray out or not. But in the end I pretty much failed and felt bad about myself. Wah wah.

I've been rehearsing what to say to you. I wish you'd just apologize. I have two speeches, one for each outcome (friends or not friends?), but they both feel so inadequate. I hate hate hate this whole thing. I hate losing you even more. I loved you crazy hard. Maybe too hard.

Blah.

Look at me, I'm all Links Magee tonight!

Oh my god! I've been tagged for a meme! By the mysterious, erudite Niobe, no less. Does this mean I've finally been inducted into the blog-o-sphere? I feel like a school girl (possibly one with braids, thick black-framed glasses and a pocket protector. can girls wear pocket protectors?). I'm giddy!

Anyway, on with the show.

The idea is to grab the closet book to wear you're sitting (no cheating. closest.), turn to page 132, find the fifth sentence on the page and then post the next three sentences. If you think this seems like sort of an odd thing to spread around the internet, I've already beat you to it. I'm going to go ahead and guess that the originator of this meme just wanted to show off to all their readers how utterly sophisticated* their reading material was, while simultaneously outing all their fellow bloggers that they suspected of being fond of Red Dress Ink. Or something like that.

As for me, I lucked out on the groovy scale. The closest thing to me is John, by Cynthia Lennon. Less groovy was this action-packed tidbit I found:

He said, "You do what you want to do, Cyn. It's fine by me." It was a relief that he could be so relaxed about it because I knew he wouldn't relish being under my mum's roof.

So there you have it. I'd tag some others, but let's face it, no one reads this blog anymore. Well, there may be the occasional pop-in from Chris, who posts more often than I do. In which case, ::waves:: Hello, Chris! Do this meme! I should probably read his blog more often. That way I might actually know some of what's going on in the chap's life. Hmm...




*Since I've started reading BSC Headquarters, I've become overly conscious about using this word. There is a time and a place, though! However, that place is probably NOT in the description of Claudia's rockin' over-sized shirt collection.