This place isn't back up, really; I just vividly recalled this a few days ago, wrote it down, and needed to get rid of it, to release it. It isn't healthy to dwell on the beginnings of things that have ended.

The bathroom was blue, as it always had been; it may still have had the tiles that seemed to float off the floor if you stared at them. It must have been night, since the light was on and gave the room a yellowish wash-- a sick tinge for a blue room. It's still like that at night. I'm glad I don't go there often anymore; it's my brother's bathroom now.

I stepped on the scale. (Nothing good can come of that sentence.) My mother peered over my shoulder at the numbers, lurid red and counting upwards. They jumped up, down, still, up, down-- that old scale caught every fidget of cold bare feet. We don't have it anymore. The one that replaced it is off by five pounds, but at least it's consistent.

I can't remember now what the number was, or even how much lower it was than the previous time, three pounds or five. It shouldn't make a difference. But I remember saying, with a woman's bragging instinct, that I had lost weight. I remember my mother sounding warm and amused, telling me that weight fluctuates monthly (I knew.) I remember protesting, still in a pitiful too-old-too-female scoff for a girl brought up to believe that age fifteen should be no different from age ten, that three pounds (or five) was too much change for a month. I had to be losing weight.

I remember panicking the moment the words left my mouth-- a fluttering, heart-clutching panic. That was it. It was the insidious uncoiling sickness that was just beginning to sew my lips closed telling me Shut up! Shut up! You'll give yourself away!

I knew that I really was losing weight. For the first time in my life, I was. But I had to keep it secret, hide it from the warm faces peering over my shoulder at the indecisive judging numbers on the scale. If I did not, the game would be up and the cold sick thing I was becoming would die. I did not then understand. But when my mother, hiding laughter, indulgently said, "All right then, I guess you're losing weight!" I felt regret. Guilt pricked at the bare soles of my feet as I stepped off the scale. It had never occurred to me before that what I was doing was a thing to hide. A diet was a public thing, announced while picking at a sandwich to a group of supportive, equally dieting friends. An eating disorder is a thing behind closed bathroom doors, waiting for the scale to resolve two meager pounds lower than last time. An eating disorder is a thing behind closed lips.

I will not pretend that was when it started. But that was when I should have known.

The Notebook is going low-tech for a while. I'll be back eventually.

You have never been alone, sweetheart,
Candy-eyed dear with a honey that sticks
All spores and seedpods to your skin.
Nectar-darling, you need never thirst.

You have never been alone,
Waxy-fingered sunflower girl.
You stand without touching in
A garish grove of upright, beaming friends.

You have never been alone. You couldn't know
Black-footed trees and leaf-dust inhalations
Tumbling, hair full of bark, over a slimy hostile root
Landing breathless in the stream, lips dripping berry red.

You have never been alone, Sister
Who I never touched. I wish you had.
I wish you hadn't given up hope while still warm and safe-
I'd have never been alone, sweetheart.

Focusing on a story I'm betaing this evening. I feel like I've been neglecting the Notebook lately... will rectify that starting tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a Sandburg poem that always gives me delicious shivers of yes-that's-the-way-it-is.

Joy

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere--
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

"You still aren't writing," he stated from just over her right shoulder. Her hand on the mouse instinctively moved to close the game of Hearts that overlaid a one-sentence Word document, but she thought better of it-- he'd already seen, and he wouldn't be angry, just concerned. If mad, incessant writing meant the violently self-annihilating end of the spectrum of unhealthy emotional states, not writing at all meant the opposite. It meant a stagnation without rest, a withdrawal without meditation.

He knew all this. He also knew that gently rubbing her hunched-over shoulders and bringing her a glass of iced tea was not going to cut it. So because of this (not because he loved her startled yelps or the way she squirmed beneath his hands, of course,) he yanked her hair back, making her neck arch over the top of the backrest and drawing one of those adorable little gasps of surprise. "You're getting out of that funk of yours and writing, darling," he purred as he tangled the elegant fingers of one hand deeper in her hair and traced the other over the line of her outstretched neck. "Or I'm withholding... um... inspiration, at least for tonight." And with a nip just beneath her ear, he left her to reawaken her own demons.

It's the Fourth of July. I'm exhausted. So instead of writing or doing anything else useful, I ended up at nosurprises. GOOD LORD. I was propping my lower jaw up with my fist to keep from gaping. Hello, thinking in color and spirals! If I don't sleep now, I am going to pass out.

Tell Me A Story in poem form, sort of. A simpler variant on climbing rhyme. Really just an attempt at getting myself enthused about this story again.

The fragile city is
aglow, iridescent, this time
temporary, muted-mime hush.
Try to brush gates
and cleats fall through,
tattering you, sun-sprinkling your robe.
This is home, but
speech is not your
own here. Four steps
and check the journey:
broken glass. Hurry! Feathers
sharpened, voice feather-hush.
Rush, rush, scream out!
Drown out doubt, drown
out now, shatter towers,
crumble poppy-flowered heaven.
From your blue place, leaven mine.