15 january

What are these strange creatures we call men? And what do i want from them?

Last night: uncaged: floundered and flapped about in cold pagan icestorm of precalculus: became angry, angry with the ridiculous propriety of halfhearted relationships and stormed recklessly into a great headwind of relational shut-ins, bludgeoning down walls in alarmed and unsuspecting individuals. Felt like Alaska: roaring, impregnable; where black rocks battle ocean.

Yesterday all the window smears wiped clean and i stared at myself in an aweful sort of newness. We all know that we are the sum of our experiments, our experiences; we know that we are lumps and lumps of smudged-together clay; but they are two very different things, knowing this, and dissecting the clumps, watching the equation fly into its peices and lucidify.

I am never satisfied with a man because i do not really want a friend, or even a lover; i want a father. I am malcontent with the entire species of manhood because they have robbed me; i have been cheated of the storybook father i was promised in Sunday School and the children's novels. I have not been protected and gradually sweetened; i have been polluted. Like the burnt-brown inside of a bloated red apple, rotted. Every one of my lumps of clay is tinted with a particular shade which is dying for father-love. Resolving to be childlike, not by conscious choice, but because: if i cannot squeeze fatherlove from my father, perhaps i can convince someone else to love and protect me paternally.

I have been cheated of full motherhood by cancer; the bloated blackened bones of my very-loving mother too flimsy and weak to do justice to her heart. And in full body is the man who stands strongly but cannot love anyone but himself. I am an orphan in the opposite: caring for my sick mother, fighting & raising my adolescent-tempered childfather. I have been robbed by humanity of parental love and protection, and so something in me rots: reverts: becomes childlike, refusing to evolve until satiated with the proper amount of familial affection.

Is this how it will sit? Will i not be able to love in equal partnership, ripened, until i am sufficiently paternally loved? Until I can rip myself from the reverse-evolution of child raising parent, suckling scars, inflicting new wounds--? I am just now graduating from pure sweet unaffected loved to a more bitter-orange one dispensed with discretion. What a terrible, terrible thing it is, to painfully grindingly earn love.

So here it collides: the child and her sensibility. How happy one is to discover and dissect oneself: one is never the same.

Oh, I am happy. I am so newly uncaged.