{Andrasta}

I have a post-it note up on my bathroom mirror, "You might die today."
In the pre-dawn darkness on weekday mornings, I shower, wondering how best to spend my last day here.
It makes the drive to work a little more thrilling, lends a bit more patience, a bit more drive, and a bit more humility.
It's important to me to go out of the way to try scary things.
I will eat almost anything for the right price.
I like food so spicy your orifices ring and glow for the next week.
I like people so spicy for some of the same reasons.
My memory is extensive, but I don't hold grudges.
I am a blistering whore for Nostalgia.

I do not always flush the toilet after peeing.
I get a kick out of peeing in public.
I carry wet napkins religiously.
I fight to the finish.
I lose at most things.
I have a crippling fear of being disliked or unloved by people I like and love.
I need to let go of some things more easily.

I was born in the same hospital as my mother and her mother.
I was beaten and raped pretty badly pretty young.
I'm totally over this stuff, and it's something to make crass jokes about now.
I am easily irked by people who let their past completely dictate or ruin their present or future.
I think genitals look weird, and anyone that writes about them being beautiful makes me laugh.
Caffeine wreaks disaster on my body, I can't handle it.
I am obsessed with eating food that will produce healthy poops.

Every time I think I like hit-and-run sex with someone I don't care that much about, I find out I'm wrong.
Bar flies, players, sluts and other prowlers have something I apparently lack. Sometimes I am envious.
Instead I most want to grow old with someone I love to be around, trust, admire, seek counsel in, and feel a worthy opponent for.
It would be nice if they gave up some nasty that made me whimper like a baby, too.
I end up footing the bill more than anyone else I know.
If I like you enough, it makes me feel really damn happy if you use me.
I often substitute buying crap for people I love over spending time I don't have with them or giving them a phone call once in a while.
This is part of why I shouldn't be a parent.
I wish I didn't think as negatively as I do.
I like to tinker with electronic gadgets, take them apart, fix them when they break, break them to play with them when they work.
I have little pieces of adapters and wires and sprockets and screws in little drawers and shoeboxes and niches throughout my room.
I keep a set of tools in my car, blankets, bottled water, various food items, warm clothes, a tent, a campfire cooking kit, and flares - just in case.
I wonder what you look like naked.
I wear very tall shoes.
I hope I never come to regret wearing very, very tall shoes.

My school papers almost always begin with disclaimers.
I slavishly work out two to three times a week, on a mission to see how far I can push myself.
I don't like sodas, but I love juices and live on chocolate milk.
I have the best dad in the world.
When I was little, I was really messed up. One of the fucked-up things I thought was that some adults were really evil aliens wearing people suits.
When I first came to live with him, every night my dad would let me check the back of his neck for the zipper before I went to bed.
He still reads me bed time stories sometimes, and doesn't yell if I run in and wake him up late at night, scared from things that go "bump!" in the night.
I can't ever seem to keep my room clean, no matter what.

I love to draw.
It is 12:34 AM right now.
A cat resembling a fluffy, toasted marshmallow is curled up at the foot of my bed.
I just threw out my ex-boyfriend's toothbrush a few weeks ago.
Tomorrow I am taking down all his pictures.
I spent five years of my life most intimately with someone who feels like a stranger to me now.
Tomorrow I will be groggy from not enough sleep, will wake up, ablute, and drive to work with the inexplicable happiness that has followed me for the past several months.
I don't know why everything is so perfectly all right and even-toned right now.
It's something in the water, or something in the air.
I see and feel and know and hear about some devastating things, and hope and wish very hard for the best.

[..."My people died with their arms stretched toward both East and West and their eyes seeking in the darkness of the skies."]


Last year