i don't want to run. just overwhelm me.

the coffee bean at tempe marketplace is making me fat. knowing a delicious and fattening frozen beverage lives less than a mile from my house has been a daily struggle for me for well over a year. i know everyone that works there, and they all recognize me. a few months or so ago, i caught eyes with a boy working behind the bar. he's exactly my type...baby face, sloppy skater-ish hair, dorky. most other girls would overlook him. but i'm consistently attracted to the underwhelming portion of the male population. greg is a perfect example, and tim to an extent, although i think that boy has potential to be devastatingly handsome. anyways, coffee bean boy is not at all devastatingly handsome, but he attracts me nonetheless. this might be due to the way he looks at me. it's a shy look, and he keeps it for just a tad bit longer than he should, and it holds a lot of interest and reverence. almost like he's afraid to look at me. it drives me nuts. it makes me feel like a super model. 

so how do i deal with this? talk to him? flirt? nope. that would be my usual approach in this situation, but it doesn't seem right. and to be honest, he makes me feel shy. we've never talked. he's always behind the bar, he doesn't take my orders. just peeks at me from over the espresso machine. 

through my frequent visitations, i have figured out that he comes into work on saturday at 11. so for the last few weeks, i've been lugging my laptop over to the coffee bean at 10:30 (yes, this requires kristi getting up early) and studying for hours. even if i have no work to do, i just sit there, sipping my delicious beverage, surfing facebook, and peeking at the boy. i try to look as nonchalantly cute as possible. and i am hopelessly shy. i couldn't even get up the nerve to ask him for a cup of water today. it's very uncharacteristic of me. 

i made new strides today. he asked for a rag and one of his co-workers threw one at his face. he laughed and looked over to me, and i gave him a big happy smile. he blushed. it was precious. and as i left, i stared at him to make sure he knew i was leaving. he caught my eye and said "have a good day." he might as well have said "i want to fuck you senseless in the back room" for what it did to the butterflies in my stomach.

it's kind of romantic, in a sickingly unproductive way.

on a less cute note, i heard some news about zack last night. he had been staying at his best friend's parents place while he got on his feet out in arizona. turns out that he had been stealing quite a bit of stuff from them, so they kicked him out and he moved back to utah, where he is being hunted by his psycho inmate brother and his drug lord friends. i wonder if he'll give his girlfriend the jewelry that he never gave back to me. it's always the bad boys, the ones that are trouble, that make me fall the hardest. chase and zack. maybe it's the excitement of knowing it's a bad idea? i had hoped i was smarter than that.

and i got a compliment last night. two, actually. the most obvious of the two was when i walked over to my friends heather and kim, and heather said "we were just talking about you...how you are the most consistently cool person we know. you never pull any shit." d'aww. but the other one, and yes i'm bragging a bit here, but only because it meant so much to me, was that when i walked into the party, i was greeted with cheers and squeals and "omg kristi!"'s and hugs and, even though i made a beeline for the keg, it literally took me over 1o minutes to reach it because people wanted to say hi to me. even ric steele and mark. knowing that people still like me always helps to cheer me up a bit :)

no babies '09

i'm starting to consider that maybe my debilitating supercold is not a product of botched energy work, but that i may actually be sick. in the normal sense. like a normal person. 

i can't decide if i should go to the doctor. 

i should. i just decided. 

but i can't decide if i will. i think i need antibiotics, if the monet-esque artwork of white lines and bubbles that has been on the back of my throat for 5 days is any indication. also, the fact that my ears are starting to ache. also, the fact that no amount of family-sized kleenex boxes can keep up with my niagra falls nose. 

but i don't wanna get out of bed :(

when did traveling doctor's go out of style? get that shit back. 

also, i'm going back on birth control. ill risk screwing up my hormones, and there's a chance i'll survive the imminent breastslashovarian cancers. but i will NOT survive a child.

or the guilt that would accompany the damage control. 

maybe i should go to the doctor. i need to get a wart removed anyways. 

like everything i'll never find again

have you ever broken someone's heart? i hope you never have to. it is the single, most excruciating thing i have ever done.

i looked into the eyes of the one person in the world who means the most to me, who's shared everything with me, who knows me better than i could ever hope to know myself.....i looked into the eyes of the person that means more to me than the WORLD, and told him that i couldn't love him.

i've never been one to be able to read emotion from someone's eyes. but when i looked into his bloodshot, teary, blue eyes, i saw the world fall apart. it was devastating. to see him fall apart like that, to see him lose all hope in the world, and to know that i caused that look on his face...

it's going to haunt me. 

i always feel like the taker. i'm always the crazy one, i'm always the one that needs to be nurtured, to be taken care of. the boy gives to me, and i take. i realize that, and i have wanted so badly to be able to GIVE something to a guy, for a guy to want to be with me because i make him a better person, not just because he can keep me from feeling suicidal. i think that's why i was so attracted to zack. he made me feel like i could HELP him. but i never thought i could do it. i'm too needy. i have nothing to give, i have nothing to offer a guy except company and an erratic and immature sense of humor. 

but then, to find out, that the very boy that saved my life, who brought me up from the very bottom of my depression, who listened to me cry for hours every single night of our senior year of high school....to find out that the boy that gave so much to me, had gotten just as much FROM me....

it's unthinkable. i knew he had loved me. i knew he STILL loved me. but i didn't realize that i offered him anything. i didn't realize that i had a positive impact of his life, that without me, his life wouldn't be as good. 

"kristi, you are the most kind, the most decent, the most beautiful person i have ever known. i've always envied your kindness, your love. you have strengths i do not, a certain wisdom and common sense i don't possess. i feel like i need that compassion, that strength in my life right now."

to think that the boy that gave me more than i can ever express, was affected by me as well? the boy that i loved for 4 years....the boy that i lost my virginity to, the boy who shared the homecoming royalty stage with me...the other half of the most infamous couple at Seton. that boy that saved my life....did i save his, as well? 

and if that's so...if he saved me, and i saved him...if he loved me, and i loved him...if we were each other's first love, first...everything. if we were each other's world for SO LONG (and really, four years is a long time when you're a kid). if we still are best friends, if he still is my confidant, my most trusted friend, my most EVERYTHING, and he loves me....

THEN WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?????????

what am i missing? i yearn for love so badly. i want to benefit someone's life. i want to be good for someone. i want a smart guy, a humble guy, a caring guy, a sensitive guy. 

hold on, let me get my "perfect man" checklist...

check. check. check. 

i have my perfect man. and he still wants me, with a love much more mature than the one we started with. 

but it's not enough for me, anymore. 

and how do i deal with that? 

 

"even in the worst of my depression, there was something i was sure of. despite feeling completely lost, i knew one thing; i love you."

all that's left to do is run.

my boss did energy and chakra work on me last night. i've tried medicine, therapy, diet, exercise....anything you could think of to give me energy, but it has never worked. no matter what i do, i'm exhausted. not just "hmm i'm sleepy", but "i actually don't know how long i can keep my eyes open." it's been 12 years. 12 years of exhuastion. i honestly don't know what 'awake' feels like, because i haven't felt it in 12 years. 

so i figure the only thing i have left to try is spiritual stuff. and my boss is nothing if not spiritual. i am a firm believer in energy and the universe and the law of attraction. so i was open to her. i was ready to be worked on. 

she had me lay down between the two legs of the Gyrotonic machine. since we aren't at our studio anymore, the floors are carpet and not wood. wood absorbs energy, so when doing energy work, you need to have contact with wood so your negative energy has somewhere to go. i held on to each leg of the wooden machine, and closed my eyes. i gave my boss the briefest of synapses of my deal. one day in 6th grade, i was tired. i took a nap. and every day after that, i've been exhausted. i take a 3 hour nap every day. 

she said "i know." she can feel my exhaustion, my despair, my hopelessness at this mystery disease that i have. 

she thought for a second, and then said "that's grief." 

fitting. i always though i'd handled my parents deaths so well. my sister gets hysterically upset on anniversaries, but they don't bother me. my parents have been dead for more of my life than they were alive. i don't remember much of them. i don't actually miss them. i don't have enough memories to miss them. when i do get sad, it's because i don't HAVE parents. i look at my sad excuse for a family and wish that i had a mommy to go to, or had a daddy to interrogate my boyfriends, or a cookie cutter family to have thanksgiving dinner with. but that happens maybe once a year. there are whole weeks, maybe even an entire month, where i don't think about my parents, or even the fact that i don't have any. i'm so adjusted to the way life is now. so i figured i was over it, i was over the grief. i was young, it sucked, i grew up and out of it. 

but it seems that it's been manifesting itself in my body as this exhaustion. this exhaustion that only allows me to work 10 hours a week. this exhaustion that caused my GPA to hover around 3.2, when i'm fully capable of a 4.0. the exhaustion that makes me cry first thing in the morning, because the idea of getting out of bed is so daunting. i guess i'm not over the grief. maybe i never dealt with it. maybe i was just too young. 

my boss started with my heart chakra. that's where grief lives. but in order to get to the heart, we need to get through my lungs. my lungs were yellow. yellow is family, sleep, sex, money. the basics. the basics. what word is coming to mind, she asked. family. that triggered the first bout of hysteria on my part. waves and waves of emotion came out from that simple word. breathe through your mouth, get that yellow out. force it out. cough. hiss. stick your toungue out. grab that yellow with your inhale and push it out with your exhale. yellow, i demand you leave now. i do not need you. i have my memories, i do not need my grief. you are making me sick, and i need you to leave. but it was stubborn. it wanted to be felt. i grabbed onto that Gyrotonic machine with all my strength and sobbed messy, snotty, loud sobs. panic attack level sobs. and then it went into my nervous system. picture your nerves, what color? yellow, family still. and then red. angry. but i don't get angry. she told me to kick and scream and pound the floor but i couldn't. i dont get angry. it doesn't want to come out. it wants to stay in my belly, making me fat. scream, she said. but i couldnt. instead, i got cold. i started shivering. my hands went numb. force it out, breath, cough. kick. out, red i demand you leave now. i will feel you and all that you have to offer, and then i demand you leave. i do not need you. out, red. 

ok, we need to try a different tactic. lets open your throat chakra, we'll get to your lungs through your throat. yellow, red. get it out. hiss. cough. open your throat chakra. open, open. 

ow. my throat hurts now. but it's not real. it's a manifestation, it's form the past. get rid of it, that's your grief. but it hurts. 

get it out. i thought it did, but i guess not. because without 30 minutes, i had a swollen, gooey, blistery throat. 

thanks for dying, mom and dad. now i have strep. 

keep trying. red. why is the red so stubborn? 

what word comes to mind? 

greg. 

what the hell? greg left me. our one year anniversary, i got a text. "i can't do this anymore." and then i heard nothing for 2 weeks. only when i went to his work did he talk to me. i never got an answer. to me, he had died. he disappeared from my life with no warning, and refused to communicate to me. that was death, and it brought to the surface the feelings of my parents dying. my body and my heart weren't ready to dig deeper to deal with the REAL feelings of death, so instead they chose to deal with the psuedo-death feelings. greg. 

greg left quickly. i breathed that out in 3 or 4 breaths. i'm not attached to holding onto him anymore. it's the deeper stuff, that yellow, that i don't want to let go of. the other colors left pretty easily, but the yellow took almost 2 hours. "family, leave" she said. and my mind screamed "no, don't go!" why do i want to hold onto to grief? why am i so attached to it? i need it. it's my comfort. it's all i know. all i know is to be exhausted and sad and scared. i stopped maturing when my parents died. i was 9, and i lost my dad. i was 10, and i was an orphan. shuffled between my grandma and my mean aunts. my sister left me. no idea what to do. scared, sad, alone. i needed an escape, and my body chose sleep. and that's where i am. i am an 11 year old orphan that doesn't belong anywhere, completely alone, scrambling for any kind of relationship i can get, be it a best-friendship with an insane crackwhore who everybody hates and who drives me crazy, or a gorgeous boy who does drugs and has a girlfriend. i cling. if someone wants to be with me, i take it. i need it. i need to belong to somebody, because i don't belong to anybody. i'm 11. and my parents just died. and i sleep because it's easier than living. and in order to allow myself the pleasure of sleeping, my body is exhausted. so that i don't have to feel guilty for sleeping. so that i HAVE to sleep. i have no other choice. if i'm too tired to stay awake, i can't fight it. my whole body is conspiring against me. 

the yellow. the yellow is conspiring against me. 

what a tragic mess you fools have made of this

it's interesting how one tiny little string of events can change you. or maybe change isnt the right word. because i haven't changed. i am exactly the same person i was before. the only things that have changed are the emotions that lay on the surface. in a few months, i won't even think of him. i barely do now, even though its only been a few weeks. i go days without thinking of him, yet he managed to flip my way of thinking. he turned me from content to brooding, but he himself made no impact on my life.

let me stop being cryptic. i was perfectly content in my single-dom. boys are neat, yes, but who can be bothered with them, really. i had my yoga, i had my cats, and i had my college degree. i had best friends all over the country, i had my ambitions. i was busy. i was content. i felt no use for a relationship. it felt good, to know that i was fine without romance. i went through the "must have boyfriend" stage when i was in 8th grade. it's not a fun feeling, that need to be in love. and then i was in relationship #1. and then right into relationship #2. and all i knew how to be was kristiinarelationship. i forgot how to be kristi. and i re-learned. through deep depression and almost-alcoholism and obsessive facebook stalking and a few failed daters and hook-ups, i learned how to be single kristi. and then, all of a sudden, i wasn't tolerating being single. i enjoyed it. i wanted to keep it. 

and then zack came along. zack. i wish you could hear how acidicly i say his name. he came along, with his drugs and his girlfriend and his depression and his need for a mommy, and i fell hard. i like to help people. i like to be needed. it's nice to be the giver, since i'm so damn good at taking. i freaked out at how hard i fell, because i knew it wouldn't end well. all the justification and tarot cards in the world couldn't really convince me that it would work out, although i let them try. so i "dumped" him, as much as you can dump someone you never really had. and he's gone. out of my life, for the most part. and i'm over him. there wasn't much to get over. there was no love. 

but he left me with glimpses of relationship. "hi, how are you" texts, and phone calls because "i wanted to hear your voice," and "i can't wait to see you"s, and lunch-break lunch dates. he left me with romantic kisses and passionate more-than-kisses and butterflies in my tummy. and it was enough to remind me of why i'm a "relationship girl." 

and now i am not so content with being single. not at all. and it's put me in this odd, bored, depressed funk. and what helps not at all is my recent obsession with all things twilight. and with twilight fandom comes all sorts of gooey, perfect romance, which was dangled in front of my face and cruelly snatched away, and now i'm like an addict, rocking away my cravings in a corner of the room.

i feel like i'm 14 again, longing for my first kiss.

edward cullen, be mine.