I'm with Carneline here; somewhere in the world there's got to be a girl who, at 24, has been maried two or three years and is just getting pregnant with her first child. Comfortably supported by her husband, happily domestic and saving up for the kid's college fund, or for a new house. Who has an herb garden, and doesn't spend so much time at work in front of a computer that she can't bear to write when she has a spare moment at home. Happily in love with someone she can be pretty confident that (barring the usual disasters) she'll spend the rest of her life with.

The other sort, the people who are happily single and career-oriented are all around me, but that's never been what I wanted to be when I grow up. They know, at least more or less, where they're going and what they want to do.

There's a theory, which I think I used to believe in, back before I almost failed Greek because I couldn't get my brain to focus on learning it, no matter how hard I tried, that if you want something enough, then you can manage it; you just have to want it enough, whatever that means. But even the things I want more than anything I have no energy to try to achieve. Though this could be that I have no idea how to make them happen.

And instead, drained of motivation, I curl up on the couch reading book after book, because fiction is the only painkiller I've found that keeps one from thinking, and cursing the migraines it causes, and the way my distance vision gets fuzzier and fuzzier since I never use it. In December I'm going to have to pass another vision test to renew my driver's lisence. And if I fail, I have to decide between glasses, the weight of which make my head hurt, or sticking contacts in my eyes which I don't know if I'll be able to do.

And I can vaguely remember a time when I didn't swear, at all. I think it was about six months ago. Most of it doesn't come out of my mouth yet, though I visited a friend from school who laughed at me for saying "damnit" to my computer for misbehaving. But it frightens me that behind my apathy for everything around me, my misery is so violent that I need 4-letter words to rip it apart.

It's all unutterably selfish. I have all the things that should be necessary for happiness: brains, beauty, health, money, a good family I get along with, friends I could probably spend more time with if I made the effort. Safety and relative security; the worst problem in our neighborhood these days is the sudden plague of ice cream trucks (3 times a night for three weeks straight, every day it's not pouring rain.) No one is going to show up at my door bleeding and asking for sanctuary; the worst I've seen while walking outside at night is a trio of lost ducklings swept inexorably downstream.

I have always had an utter scorn for the sort of person who could die of a broken heart.

I don't think I'm going to die; it would take too much effort, and go against my instincts of trying to pretend to the world that nothing is wrong. (All in all, I'm pretty sure I have the world fooled, but then none of it pays that much attention.) But my mind toys with the vision of slicing myself open across the belly, left-handed, guts spilling out. Not the pain or the blood, just a sort of distant image of self-inflicted harm that plays over and over in my brain along with fingernails gouging into palms, the teeth sinking into the heel of my hand, the sudden squalls of sobbing, a half-outlet for anger and lonliness.

I'm deprived of someone I need, I've decided, like nitrogen. I can live without him, though it takes most of the substance out of the world. You can breathe pure oxygen, and not be harmed by it until you light a match and the world bursts into flames. I need him as a stabilizer, someone to soak up my sparks, which he could do (did) without ever realizing he was doing so. Someone on whose existence I can rely, when I have no religion to cling to. Maybe that's too much to ask of someone, but I don't think he'd mind if he could understand that was what I was asking, could see that I depended on him.

Instead, I'm literally without him, or even any way to contact him. If he followed the plan (but plans don't come easily to him; he cannot set aside time a day in advance to arrange a phone call) he should have flown back from somewhere-in-europe on friday. Where to after that, I don't know; he didn't when he left. His cell phone is still turned off, so the only place I might be able to leave a message is with his parents, who will know barely more about his plans than I do. I haven't heard from him since mid-april, when he called from scotland to ask for my address so he could send me a postcard. One. Six sentances, plus greeting. For all I know, he's died somewhere, and nobody will ever think to tell me about it.

How's that for a stable existence. And meanwhile, my brain produces phrases while I'm not looking, things like: "I'm planning on marrying him," in an I just need to convince him of this sort of way. Which is bad; I know I'm basing the concept on far too little information, that for all I know if I were ever given the chance to live with him-- to know the parts of him he insists on trying to protect me from, however much I tell him not to-- I wouldn't think it would work out either. And worse, I can't tell if I mean it; it sounds like just the sort of thing you say, but it could be my dissatisfaction with life pushing me places I really shouldn't go. I have a horror of being manipulative, but I feel like my back-brain is working on making me attempt the ultimate con of trying to snare someone into marrying me. I hope I'm just imagining things.

I imagine lots of things, in the spaces between books, and the silences between ice cream trucks. But it comforts me a little bit that I can still imagine a world in which it all turns out right; in which I can let go of all the pain and anger and misery if I could only find myself in the only safe place in the world: his arms.