I’m in the interesting position at the moment, of living in an urban area, around lots of relatively successful, creative people, many of whom I see on a regular basis. We talk about all manner of things, care about some of the same things and have some of the same tastes. The main difference between myself and these people is the fact that I have never been able to hold a steady job. I may as well be a homeless person. All of my friends know that I am always poor. I have big ideas, and sometimes feel like I understand certain things on a level that they don’t, but I cannot maintain a basic consistency in my personality. One day, I will be the smartest person you’ve ever met. The next day, you will be amazed when I can’t follow through on basic domestic tasks. I cannot bring myself to care about a job within capitalism being a wage slave. Furthermore, I am useless at one. Totally and utterly valueless. I will never be a pair of hands or a body on the line. But also, I have very good ideas, but not consistently. Some days, I can’t brush my teeth.

So I ask you, where does this leave me? Should I file for disability? I can tell I am falling apart. I am getting farther and farther away from everyone. I am finding it harder to relate to people, or even speak with them in public.

When I conceive of paradise in my mind’s eye, it is a place out in the country, with trees around, relatively secluded, nothing fancy. A quiet place where I can get my thoughts together and live very simply. I would need an internet connection. But I don’t even think I’d have a phone. A quiet place, with trees whispering all around. A place where I can watch the sun rise and set, and hang my laundry on the line. Quite honestly, I want a place where I can talk to myself, and where the only people in my immediate vicinity are people I love, who love me. Animals. Paintings, books, and mirrors. Old things, and worn things. A softer, duller, slower life.

I can talk to my friends in the city about childish things. Things which have no relation to clocks and checkbooks. We can talk about food, and trees, and their childhood dreams, and their greatest ambitions and ideals. But I can’t even have a credit card or a bank account. I don’t have a job or a car, or any money. And I don’t think I’ll ever have those things. What should I do to pay for the privilege of being alive? I must do something.

The time for me to figure this out has come and gone so many times, and I must face the fact: I have no idea how to support myself. I am as helpless as a baby. It is not getting any better. the older I get, the more muddled and strange I become.

Strangely enough, and I never know if this is a sign of advancing mental illness or truly the way things are– I really do feel as if I can see a big picture that other people cannot see. Why I feel this way, I’m not sure. But I am always in the position of observing people, and reflecting on how limiting our jobs are on us. I do not want a job like this. I seem to be so stubborn, I would rather kill myself or run away than be involved in this sort of job. I must be myself at all costs, because I have tried to be someone else so many times, and I can’t keep up the act.

I make no sense, I adhere to the most passive, yin, underdog, long-term, obscure, nonwinning, meek and retreating of things. I wish to disappear from this society and yet survive. What are the most important things to me– the blackness of the ocean at night, the sound of wind in trees, the rhythm of waves beating the Lake Erie shore, a wave of wind across a field of tall golden grass, the smell of minerals on gnarled carrots freshly pulled, verdigris on copper, the perfect arc of Robert Mangold and Ellsworth Kelly paintings, my ex-husband’s dimples, kabuki plays, old buckets, pencils, boards, oil paint, stripes, barns, these things. An endless, endless list of things which cannot be kept, banked.

Money is necessary to prevent the decapitation of these things. I have none, and so must watch them disappear, and cannot afford to be among them. I am going further and further away. I am disappearing.

Outside, there is a lot of confusion. A lot of people, who knows what they think. The smell of roses, peonies, berry flowers, clover. Heady scents, creamy and on fire.

I am very confused. I realize that my deepest depressions directly correlate to my deepest love for nature. Is it not practical to be upset when the thing you love the most is being defiled, and people laugh at you for crying?

How can I reconcile how I feel when barefoot, on land I trust, with the embarrassed feeling of clocking in to a job? Did you ever notice that when someone clocks in, everyone looks at them? It’s embarrassment. The embarrassment of holding our jobs holds us together in our work units. Or have you noticed how when people cross a bridge over a river, they always look at the river? It is because they want to go to it.

All of our emotions home in on water, go to water. Water is the conductor of emotions. We cry tears, why do we do that? Because water always wants to go down, as low as it can. It wants to pour, and be spilled, and fall into crevices and drain out. Seeking a level.

I am on fire with confusion. What is the line between reason and cowardice? Or is there one?

Dreams of myself running away, into the woods, sleeping in trees, touching only real things and being so silent. Tanned to a crisp, pulling up the duff for my blanket, quiet at last. Level. Seeing the math in all things, silently.

How would I do it. Could I do it. I may be one of the dying ones. Do I have what it takes to live. Half yes, half no. Is it because I don’t like my life or because I wasn’t given enough? Originally, when they handed it out, I was incomplete. Always looking. Don’t want to be whole, but more. Always trying to convince, persuade, give me more.

Inconstant, a zealot, sentimental, angry, bewildered, in love with it.

A tree and I can stand by the truth, silently. We are sad together, but factually. Facts.

Feeling very hermit-y. By turns, ridiculously light-hearted and generous, mixed with periods of total, bottomlessly abject depression that just sort of amaze me. Finding out that stoic philosophy is a hard friend, but a good one, and the freedoms gained are simple, but rich. Finding out that sometimes, you really do have to yell at people. Sometimes they require it.

Trying to find the right balance between duty-bound and poetry-blind. Seeing that my psychological and spiritual wounds will have their out, even when I try to blindly Pollyanna my way through them by working my ass off. At some point, I will have to have an embarrassing freakout about my parents or my kid or what have you, in a safe space, and really cry a lot and act like a total maniac, in order for me to not project these things in my daily interactions. And I don’t want to, because it’s too hard and I’m busy and waah waah.

Trying to really understand that although the universe may be made of bliss, it’s an insectile bliss, and eggs may need to be broken to make the omelet. What do I want? A blinding question. I may complain endlessly, but what do I want?

A farm. I want a farm. Or perhaps I want one because it is some just-slightly-inaccessible thing that can be forever out of my grasp, something to pine for. For I love pining. Even the sound of the word conjures up images of lonely mist-swept beaches staggered with pines in the moonlight, and the smell of woodsmoke, the tang of seawater, and the way a barn takes on the quality of being Taj Mahal. It is far enough away that I can pine for it, without having to cut off any chickens’ heads. Is this why?

I have become aware that I deeply, deeply, so very deeply want a house of my own somehow. So very badly. I am scared of how badly. I want it so badly. Will I then feel that I finally have a home? That I can truly love this place, I am embraced? That life is not out to get me? I am tired of playing this slight of hand of gamely placing a smile over my eternal sense of loss. I want to arrive at my home, and begin living. To be responsible, responsive to a place.

I know, I know it isn’t fair. And what’s wrong with football?? Well, if I could just go look at a goddamned tree without 50 strangers jogging by, listening to Arcade Fire, that’s what. And that’s if I’m lucky.

Look, people. Do something surprising. Catch me off fucking guard. PLEASE, for the love of CHRIST. I know, I know. I need to just move away. And why not? Maybe one day I’ll be like Arthur Russell or Charles Burchfield, and everyone will say, “Oh yeah… that girl… I was at a party with her once”, or whatever.

If you’re entertaining, please be my friend. I have had enough of stupid hipsters whose brains you could go effortlessly spelunking in. You throw something in there, you never hear a sound. It’s bottomless and puffy, like an animated cloud in a Youtube video. Smooth sailing.

I’m too old to be young, and too young to be old. I liked Lou Reed at 12 years old and have pretty much been 12/49 ever since. Please help me. I am not being superior. I am just bored out of my goddamned mind.

What makes it worse, is the horniness. Yes. I admit it. It is spring, and I can tell. But I’m physically incapable of making it with anyone who isn’t ideal. At this point. It makes for a lot of crappy encounters. Dumb dudes who want to sleep with me, but can’t carry on a conversation. Smart dudes who aren’t quite my type. Maybe I’m being too picky? I don’t think so. To be tacky and quote E.T. , “This is reality.” Babies happen, all kinds of shit happens. Emotions happen.

What I want is not findable. I want Buddy Cole from Kids in the Hall, but I want him to like women. And also overcome me physically. And for him to listen to old R.E.M. and not be a dude. But he has to like bacon, and be a farm husband. And have dimples, and brown hair and brown eyes. And dress sharply. I’d like to iron things, fold things and make beds. He has to understand Andy Warhol, or at least Bresson. There have to be things I don’t understand about him, just a few. Nice hands. Most of all, please don’t bore me. And love me. Be a reader.

This is why I’m going to be a cat lady. The worst feeling, is feeling so full of wonderful things, and not knowing where to put them, or give them to. No one. No one.

But I will.

It’s an interesting sensation when the tiny little hope in the background of your life gets snuffed out. It’s the engine behind a lot of things. No, I don’t want to die, exactly… I just don’t want to do this any more. I feel like screaming at people, what does it matter now? Still the everyday with it’s jobs and expectations, and people buying groceries. Maybe I believed in something once. But I am not allowed to believe in it any more.

I had heard a metaphor, of lives being turned over like a mouse’s nest by a harvester. The ants on our kitchen counter. What does it matter.

And I’m so tired, I just can’t even tell you. I just don’t care any more. My body is just in my way. I have to ignore everything, because if I don’t… if I don’t.

I have to find a way out of this box. There is no me to be any more. I have ceased to exist.

I am stuck here in Columbus Ohio, and it is now an economic catastrophe all over the country, so chances are I’ll be here for another soul-crushing 12 years. I have always hated this city, and yet here I am. I’m going to have to sign my divorce papers because the man I married has his head firmly ensconced in his own ass. Of course, he’s always gotten what he wanted, from birth until now, so why should this instance be any different. Why shouldn’t I just walk to the strip mall in Ohio, by myself, and fucking cry my eyes out in front of some notary at a bank I can’t even get a checking account in because my life is a fucking mess. And why shouldn’t the love of my life be living in the greatest city on earth, successful and dating some fucking chippy who works at one of the trendiest museums in Brooklyn? And why shouldn’t this have happened because I chose to take the higher road and not abandon my kid? Why the fuck not. Tell you what, I’ll just stay in Columbus, Ohio and rot away for another 12 years until I’m the fucking cat lady.

My new job is also interesting. My boss spends their day throwing verbal razor-studded anvils at everyone, and we’re all supposed to eagerly catch those in beds of downy feathers. For five days a week. Then I come home and do the mom thing, and try to have some sort of social life but it’s not really there. Just a bunch of fucking quasi-strangers who probably think I’m fucking nuts, who bore the living shit out of me and spend their time talking about how much they like Tarantino and Ben fucking Folds.

I would work at the nature preserve, but they’re not exactly hiring, and aside from that, there’s no one there to marry and it’s out in B.F.E. I wrote Wendell Berry a long, long letter, by hand, and it took me weeks to write it. This man, who is my favorite writer, and who has an entire essay devoted specifically to how he’ll never use a computer, sent me back a computer-generated form letter, with a space left for his signature which he did not sign. So that’s that. Certainly no Woody Guthrie pilgrimage.

This is it. This is my life. I am never getting out of Columbus, the love of my life is gone, and nobody gives a shit. Join the fucking 9-5 club and eat shit. Be happy I have a job. The end. I am fucking bored to death, all I ever fucking do is try to make something out of this pile of shit in front of me, and it never gets me anywhere. What is the fucking point.

You can be with someone more comely.

You can be with someone who, who

But you will never be with someone who loves you as much as I do.

You will never be with someone who is a much a mystery to you, as I am.

I love you, you need a measure of freshness to your control.

I love you, in spite of the fact that you are a remorseless, materialistic asshole who will learn the hard way.

I love the very soul of you, parts of you that you do not even know or believe in yet.

I love you unconditionally, as if you were my child. I love you in spite of the shit you pull, but I demand worship.

I love the parts of you I don’t understand because you are a man.

I love the idiocy of your idea that you are in control.

I love the control you demand.

The Woman wants a Man for the Baby who falls like a roulette ball.

The Woman wants a signed contract because a Man will have his Lay.

You can laugh now, but give it 5,000 beers. I’ve always had the long view of this relationship.

What happened to the Man in the White Suit?

He’s not wearing it, and he doesn’t deserve to see me naked. Still, it’s Wednesday, and I am his wife.

I am signing the papers alone, because you’ve decided it’s meaningless. That means I don’t love you. Enjoy your exile.

The pain is starting in earnest now. I have been sawn in half and there is no talking my way out of it. The pain of a lifetime. There is no way out. I want to accept it but it is too big. It is starting now. It is starting now.

I have to accept it. It’s like holding something very hot which is burning me and so I turn it around and around in my hands, hot, hot, hot, hot, but still I can’t put it down, there’s no where to put it down. If I could put it down with God.

He doesn’t care, if anything I think he’s momentarily amused. Where did this feeling come from? It is going to take a complete re-orientation of my body, my mind, everything about me to swallow this. It is happening now, I am stupid with the profundity of it. Stupid. The sun looks blue. These things which I can’t let go, these lives which I can’t afford, oh please God help me. I am earnestly praying. Oh please God. Oh please God help me.

This pain which I dimly suspect goes all the way back to my mother, my father, but for some reason has come to rest in this person, in him. This dull place like an aching tooth which is my customary home away from the home I have never had. This howling place between sheer windowless buildings. This pain, it is starting. I will be alone, alone. All of it was gone, before it even started. The painting is made before the brush is lifted. All of it, a koan I never unraveled, stands staring me in the face like a wall of rifles. Sawn in half, and I look around, scooping up parts of myself. Trying to talk my way out of it. Please God. Please don’t leave me alone. I am stupid and have no business handling such things.

I will go to bed, and when I wake up, it will be there. In my dreams, it will be there. Please show me the way out. I want to feel competent. I want to see the sun. I will have to admit this. Turning it around, and around, will I whittle it away. Spring is coming. Help me God.