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I think about texting you basically every day, but I don't. I'm still frail and sensitive and the same part of me that wants to touch you shrinks at the thought of any human contact. My therapist thinks I have agoraphobia, but I think it's probably closer to scopophoia, the fear or being seen. I hardly ever leave the house, and when I do it's at night, when I can feel cloaked and hidden. In the grocery store I buy the same things in the same order to minimize the chance of holding someone up, of looking foolish, or being noticed. I talk to people online or through texts but have so few face-to-face interactions per month that I can count them on one hand. I think about texting you basically every day, but I don't.
I saw an article I thought you'd like today; a profile on Mitski in the New Yorker. You two seem like kindred spirits, both obsessed with structure and function and old words from old places. People who are married to something because it's what they love and also the only thing they have. But I'm here writing this, instead of sending you a link, because I'm afraid for you or anyone else to see me like this, even if only for a moment. And I'm too tired to hold the walls up long enough for a conversation. If I never go outside, if I never talk to anyone, the walls do what walls are supposed to do, and hold themselves up. Then all I have to do is check Instagram to keep tabs on everyone else, and even if people aren't telling me things, aren't personally folding me into the movement of their lives, I still know what's going on. That's the same, right? It's just information passing back and forth, what's the difference between reading a post and having a conversation, the result is still the same.
My mother is harping on me to meet people again, saying that she wants to meet her grandchildren before she dies, and that's about as helpful as it sounds. How I am isn't your fault though, and that in and of itself feels like progress. You were so long ago, and so much has happened since then. It's all the "since then" that's the problem, honestly -- I thought that what we went through was bad but I had no idea. We were stupid kids with stupid problems, and even with the 911 calls and nights on the floor, I had no idea what was coming.
There's a prayer in the Old Testament that my dad gave me a book about. Jabez was the type of old testament sap that got shit on constantly, thus earning him favor in the eyes of God, and the Bible says he explicitly prayed for God to "enlarge [his] territory," in both a literal and spiritual sense. I've stopped saying this prayer after everything that happened with ****'s little brother, not because I don't believe in God anymore, but because if that's what enlarged territory looks like, I can't handle for mine to get any bigger.
Maybe that's why I've turned so deeply inward, made my life as small as possible. I threw out almost everything when I moved to California, and I've been back for almost three years now but I've hardly replaced any of it. Things break and I just let them be broken. I suffer things I can afford to fix because part of me feels like it's excessive or unnecessary to spend money on a problem that isn't actively killing me.
A few months ago I made the decision to eat what I wanted because I can afford to now, and I put on 40 lbs., so now I don't eat anything that I like. I haven't lost the weight, but I do feel like I'm being punished, and that's the same, right? You never ate at all, except for little tastes while you'd cook. Your portions were always butchered by the time I cleaned my plate, to make it seem like you'd eaten more than you had. I snooped through your bathroom drawers once and found all of your laxatives and fiber supplements, but I never told you about that. I wonder a lot about how you're doing with that, and with your drinking. I hope that you're a lot healthier now than you were back then. I think about texting you basically every day, but I don't.
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