My head is killing me. I know why, and I can’t even be mad. I lost my side dude’s number.

I feel the familiar hollow pounding in the back of my head, and the matching hollowness of the chest, like there’s nothing to hold my spine up, like I’m sucking breath from the outside world and it’s just wooshing down my throat and filling me, like a giant balloon of skin and bone, like all of my organs are apathetic and flopping around the bottom of my abdominal cavity like they do after they’ve been removed from the body, like they are when you see them pulled out during an autopsy or when you see them laid out in styrofoam trays in front of the butcher’s station.

I don’t even know if my writing is good today, and I don’t care. Let me see if I can find a point in this.

I wanted to write today because I can. Last night, I was hanging out with some friends (omigod, I’m probably going to die in the second wave) and of course, as we were doing all of the things that lead to this particular type of hollow headache, it was offered to me that I stay over. I declined, saying that I really needed to wake up in my own bed more often.

I stopped for a while, before saying this, the truth – I wish I had woken up next to the boy. I do, in fact, really miss him.

And that’s scary, frankly. I have felt this way about men before. I know it. I’m not one of those people that constantly every time insists this man is different, this relationship is going to be different, or anything like that. I have felt this way before, and I have stopped feeling this way before, and I have felt very, very badly as a result. Is this really something I want to do again?

I don’t know if the Sheriff has delivered the papers to my ex yet.

Honestly though, I’m very scared that this relationship is going to take over my life. To be honest with myself (I really have to stop putting that preface in here – this entire space is designed for me to be honest with myself) I know that this dude is severely psychologically disturbed, not that I’m not, but the reason it is so externally apparent in him (I think I still present quite well when I want to, though it feels stressful. People are constantly quite impressed with me, as they should be) is that he is, I’m being painfully honest, not smart enough to adequately understand what it takes to appear sane.

And for this reason (I probably shouldn’t have started a new paragraph here, it’s unnecessary, but I realize that I’m using these parenthesis to postpone writing what is a set of really hard facts to face) he takes time away from me that I should be using to do better things. And he doesn’t even understand what those things are. Time spent with him, in his case, is an uplifting experience. For me, it’s a time drain.

And (again, why) again, why? I know that I even went out there looking for men because the work in front of me looked too hard, and I wanted to wrap myself up in something trivial, and wrap myself up with someone trivial.

It’s not that I’m not in love with him. It’s like drowning. In a wide, calm, river that has a deceptively deep bottom and a deceptively strong, slow current. It’s (I realize that I would like to stop using that pronoun so much, as it’s aesthetically displeasing to me) how I picture the Rio Grande, even though I have never been there. I wonder if I ever will.

It’s like drowning. I want him, and I don’t want to talk about what that feels like because that is not a new feeling. None of this is a new feeling, but there are several other places to talk about being in love, and I’m sure I will. My coffee is getting cold and I have wasted too much time talking about trivialities.

It’s like drowning (I will use the pronoun here because the entire concept is aesthetically displeasing to me). The river is love, the river is lust, and my body is submerged in it, and I am exhausting everything I have as all of my muscles strain against a force as powerful as the earth itself, the innate pull of water everywhere to the bottom of the ocean floor, to be pushed away by new water that also wants to be there, maybe even more. And the drive of all humans to take our weak, barely warm spark and combine it with another, maybe rub to create some fire, maybe make more. This is love.

Flailing, with everything I have, but that’s not everything I see, as I’m still trying to keep my head above water. My mind races with thoughts, distress. My mind will be lost with my body. My body doesn’t mind being submerged, my entire effort is to try and keep my head above water. But my mind can’t swim, it can’t help the rest of me. It can only watch, horrified, as it gets dragged to the bottom with the rest of me. Is there any way to stop this. My mind is helpless, and can only come up with useless observations and descriptive pokes at assessing the feeling, the feeling of pure terror as you see (you again) you’re entire life dissolving into this river, into something as stupid as a harlequin romance novel. This is not the type of book I set out to write.

And that’s the fear. That I will lose my life to this love. Not in some stupid Romeo and Juliet kind of way, but that I’ll do nothing for another day but lie in bed with him, while I really have work that’s way too complicated to discuss here, and way too complicated for him to even approach understanding.

We’re supposed to hang out tonight. My boyfriend called last night.

I guess I could at least check the messages.