at least now, i'm worried about things that don't have anything to do with you. work, friends, relationships. they all exist outside of you.

but i still feel it. the things you left me with. i feel it in the urge to run away with every rapid heartbeat in the face of any conflict. the small strains of stress in everyday life. you're winding strand of poison ivy in at the back of my throat. i want to run away and forget.

i just checked and the last time i had an anxiety attack was in november. well, ok. i think i had one on the night before graduation, too (it wasn't about graduating. it was about family). those are the only ones i can recall.

i just had an anxiety attack. i am writing this in the hopes of feeling better.

even writing that sentence is really hard. "you call that an anxiety attack? you cried like a fucking baby on the floor and squeezed your shark plushie and couldn't breathe. so what. that wasn't even that bad," is what hindsight is telling me.

i've always had trouble taking up space. i wanted to be invisible. i didn't want to take anyone's time or breath. i didn't want people to look at me or to hear my stupid fucking stutters. we had a staff meeting today and i felt embarrassed and wrong just being there. i just sat my idiot ass down and stayed quiet for 2 hours because i knew that if i spoke, i would

1. stutter
2. lose my train of thought and have a really long awkward silence while people wait impatiently
3. look stupid as fuck as if i don't already look incapable or childish enough.

i was holding it together really well at the end of the meeting to when i walked into my room that i fooled even myself to thinking that i was alright. a coworker gave me a ride and i cracked jokes in her car and we both laughed and it was nice and i got out of her car and walked into my apartment and my housemate was cooking so we shared small chatter and i laughed and we had a good interaction and i went upstairs and i felt my face morph into a blank stare and when i walked into my room i started hyperventilating. i kept thinking, "ok, what's going on. it's ok." and i kept fanning myself because my ears were feeling hot and i paced around my room trying to catch my breath and i wasn't going to let this spill over to something that was going to be much much worse. 

it did, but i still had the capacity to kneel down on the floor slowly and grab a stuffed animal before i curled in on myself and started sobbing. i don't even know what's wrong. i don't know what triggered it; maybe it's just this whole day, or the past three months, or whatever, i don't know. something kept telling me that i'm wrong and i'm making too many mistakes and that i shouldn't even be here and that every single decision i made since march has been a mistake and i just can't seem to do anything right. i make mistakes everyday. i just feel wrong. like i shouldn't be here. 

when i feel very dramatic, on my way to safeway crossing foothill, i think that it'd be ok if i wasn't here anymore. it wouldn't make much of a difference, except to myself, because i'd feel less sad and anxious and embarrassed and wrong and i wouldn't be taking up so much space that i don't deserve. i keep telling myself i don't deserve to be here. i think i'm wrong for being here but i don't know how to fix that. i don't know how to fix this. i can feel better temporarily and smile and do work and get through everything but at the end of the day i am so so so sad and i wish i wasn't in this body taking up so much space. i feel like i don't deserve the air that's circulating in my lungs and i feel bad for hyperventilating. 

i know that i'm depressed, not that i've been doing anything about that. my eating schedule is ridiculous. today i had 3 cups of coffee and a cup of chobani flip yogurt and i can't imagine myself eating anything else tonight. yesterday night i ate so much and made too much food that i couldn't do anything else but eat it. i felt so gross afterwards and i almost threw up but i kept feeling like i need to eat. my sleep schedule is not doing me any favors either. i had maybe 3 hours of sleep last night because i'm so used to sleeping at dawn but i had work at 7am today. i can't handle myself. i need someone to tell me what to do. but i don't want anyone else to know and feel burdened about it.

i need to take up less space. i don't deserve to take up the space that i occupy. i keep telling myself i need to take care of myself tonight if i don't want this to get any worse but i'm also telling myself that i don't deserve that. 

i'm going to see if i can eat anything. then take a shower. i want to lay in bed.

it was the near-darkness of the room, i think, that set my thoughts on a downwind spiral toward memories of you. small ones, insignificant ones, ones that hadn't even trailed in as lost thoughts in moments of solitude.

i thought about the gold butterfly earrings you gave me on my 20th birthday. they didn't even fit into my ear piercings because they were meant for toddlers. you told me that it was gold-coated as though that was prideful thing, but the box it came in was the kind you get with purchase and i knew exactly where it came from. the pink box with the edges lined in green came from the small jewelry corner at Wal*Mart and the earrings themselves probably cost like 20 dollars. for some reason, when i think about those earrings and how you gave them to me and how i tried to fit them into my piercings even though the bar was too short, i get so sad and i end up tearing up, so unreasonably and so unexpected. i don't know what part of it makes me feel so sad. is it that they were from Wal*Mart? or is it that they were from Wal*Mart but you presented them to me as if they were something high-end? was it that they didn't fit in my ears? i don't know. i don't know, but in that dark room, on that rocking chair, with the noise machine on 'ocean breeze' and the toddler drinking milk from her bottle in my arms, i was reminded of that. i don't know. i don't know. i just don't know how i can hate you with every cell of my being one day and miss you with tears that flow without reason the next day.

you're a pulsating pull in the midst of a thousand memories, one memory, too big to contain in the shell of a self i shed long ago. if it were easy, i'd have torn you away from the neurons you occupy and stomped them beneath my feet, feelings and fears and all. the rhythmic knock you tap on locked doors, your sigh fogging up the car's frozen window, dry lips and your hesitant but truthful yet undeserved sorry. your crooked canine tooth, your hand reaching for the length of hair no longer there for two weeks after you get a haircut, your slight lisp between the s and r when you say that's right. none of these things are special to you, but the culmination of those little things threaded you into a web i cannot escape from. 

is your dream your own? how did you get here? what do you want to do?

where did your dream stem from? was it birthed by the past you so desperately wanted to erase? then what is there to be proud of? how do you tell people that you want to _____________ when you can't bring yourself to talk about the origin of it anyway? what are you trying to do? are you trying to cover up what happened by piling atop it hopes and wants that you don't even deserve?

how can you ask me why you feel so empty? don't you know better than me? isn't it because you've masked that part of you that you are so ashamed of and have pushed away until a large ear-ringing blankness took up most of your consciousness? you think you're compressing that past into something small and forgettable, don't you? well, you can squeeze it into a single point that could be washed away by a long sob or deep sigh but that makes its existence all the more poignant and intense, did you know that? you can't just cram something like that into a .1x.1x.1 ml^3 bit of space and expect it to disappear. isn't that why every time you cry you can't breathe and you panic and you can't move and you can't form a single string of thoughts and you feel like you don't exist at all? and what you've been all along is a single molecule in a distal time, pressurized, vibrating, a dull point amongst a skyline of burning and burnt-out stars.

the song crescendoes to its last chorus as she nears the top of the hill, grassy plains opening wide to a sky dotted with whispers of rainclouds. rolling cymbals release, steady ascending scale reaching the tonic note, a pretense of placid permanence leading into a cinching minor chord.

melody dims to a repeated verse again. 5 o' clock sun is still only past its highest point of passage, but that's relative, isn't it, because the sun is ever-revolving in an unshapely oval, route calculated, preordained.

the last time she was here, yellow wildflowers dotted the 90 acres of green hills, bracing against ocean breezes and seeking warmth, turning heads toward the golden gate bridge as the sun set between its two arches.

she wonders how many feet stepped upon the overgrown grass, the wedges of second-hand shoes that stifled stubborn wildflowers of their spring bloom; not even the frequent february showers could breathe in the life those steps smothered out.

not yet out of winter's grasp, but too close to spring's embrace to deny its forthcoming. those wildflowers' times fell just short of the warm welcome that spring so readily gives out.

playlist on repeat. they're instrumentals, but the genres range to broadly for her to settle on a certain mood. are her emotions in the shallow tides challenging the tangle of stacked rocks at the shore? amongst the flattened, limp grass that people tread upon? within the corpses of wildflower, inches below newly laid soil? only the bass drum earnestly beats on, tying together the empty spell from the end of one song to another's beginning.

it's march. i'm reminded of the first time that i walk down university with you.

it's too cloudy to be welcoming, streets bustling with new admits and parents fussing over goodbyes. we meet with your friend and sit around a tall round table in the restaurant, the three of us. the stool has no back support and my legs are already aching from the day before, when i walked back and forth from my dorm to campus four times.

i think you leave to go to the bathroom, or to order a drink or something, and my social deprivation of the past four years lives in the awkward silence between me and your friend.

we walk down shattuck (as i later piece together; at the time, i have no idea what street we're on) and pass by the chain-link fence around the deconstructed bart station outside chase bank and fake-target. i don't have memory of the in-between of seeing that and walking up to wurster hall, but another one of your friends joins us somewhere there.

you tell me that day that you don't like boba in your tea, and that's the first time in a long time that i find out something new about you. i'm reminded of how different we are, and how that difference never seems to converge into similarity over time.

i feel embarrassed to be in front of your friends because i still feel like i barely know you, even though, objectively, i've known you longer. but they know you better, and you've opened up to them, and they're your friends, and i still consider myself just an underclassman who happened to get on your right side. when our silences are uncomfortable and palpable, the silences between you and your friends are inviting. and i feel bad because you don't deserve the cramped silence in between your words and mine.

and that distance between what you want to say and what i hear, what i want to say and what you hear, never lessens over the course of the time that we know each other. it's been a year since i've spoken to you, and the last thing we do is watch a movie that shits on a book that we both love. i ask you for a hug, and you frown uncomfortably as i wrap my arms around you but you stay rigid like you'd rather be anywhere but in my embrace. you don't look back when you leave the theater, and you don't see that i watch your back get farther away.

i'm reminded that it's always been like that; you've always been ten steps in front of me, two years ahead, a person apart, and 375 miles away.

march reminds me of you in a lot of ways, but some in ways that are unrelated to you. birthday, competition, peak of rehearsal, spring atmosphere, reaching for something just out of grasp, cheesecake factory, probability and proportions, the water fountain at bella terra, last hug outside apartment gates.

in some moments when i was younger, i held on to those things as if to claw at the last reserves of who i used to be.

in march, when we walk down university, you and i are two different people who never managed to see the other as more than a thing from the past to hold on to.

lemme have a real moment for a sec. so for the longest time, all i've been wanting to do is get away from my mom. i don't hate her. i just think that i'll end up wanting to delete myself off the face of the earth if i live with her for more than a month. and she's not that terrible now, compared to how she was when i had no choice but to live with her, but i still wouldn't be able to do it.

i told my brother the other day that i probably wouldn't be going back home after graduation, that i'd most likely stay here and do something else. and that was always the goal. and then i was supposed to be free. (and i understand how childish and teen-angsty it sounds to say "oh! freedom from my controlling mother asdfhjahskdfa but i. it's just. it's hard to explain and i am terrible with words.)

but after having told him that (and this has been on my mind even before that, just in abstract thoughts), i realize. i see that i'm just pushing that responsibility onto him. my brother, who runs a hole-in-the-wall restaurant by himself, who likes to buy nice things for himself when he can, who wants to get married and have a family, who wants to fix our own broken one, whose status is always in jeopardy, that guy. he has not done anything to deserve being tied down by our mother who refuses to let her children go. he doesn't even go "home" most days. he pays for that home but our mother just fills it with secondhand antiques and furniture picked up from the streets. it's not a place where he belongs.

and i'm not sure what i am going to do. what i can do for him, or this family, or myself. it seems like someone is always going to have to make a sacrifice in this family.

speaking of which, my dad is going to be spending christmas by himself up here, probably working. my sister and i are both going down to socal. and, when i think about it, i have not spent a christmas with him in years.

and i've also thought about graduation, too. looming. so soon. i brought up to my dad what i've been thinking about. i wasn't sure if i should invite him and her and have that awkward encounter again. (i remember how it was for my sister's graduation.) and he said that it might be better if he didn't go. i said that wouldn't be fair for him. then he said that he would also rather mom not know that he is living up in norcal. i said ok. and later i said that he should come to the university commencement instead of the major specific one. he said he'd be grateful even for that. i felt so bad. like i was sacrificing his being there at my graduation where i'd be getting my diploma, simply because i don't want conflict at the actual graduation. but i can't help it. the thought of having both my dad and mom there and having my mom grimacing and speaking about my dad like he's the spawn of the devil right in front of him and ruining everything is going to make me throw up.

i didn’t know that we were drifting apart until i started rereading our texts. 

my “how are you doing today?” “did you eat yet?” “don’t work too hard!” and your one or two word response. the gaps between my text and your reply, and the immediacy of my reply to yours. flashbacks to holding my phone to my chest at night wondering if you were going to text back or if you had already fallen asleep, when in reality i was the farthest thing on your mind. 

the more i scroll up, the more i realize the difference between you now and you back then. you used to lay your head on my shoulder and tell me about your summer abroad, about the time you got drunk and made out with someone in a deserted park. you used to teach me about probability because i sucked at math but i still don’t know shit about it because i was too distracted by the way your lips moved to pay attention. you used to twirl my hair around your fingers when we watched movies. you used to insist that you see me in person on my birthdays. we used to see each other everyday. 

and i exit the messaging app, because i feel like i’m thinking about an entirely different person. it’s still you; you look the same, you sound the same, you like the same things, you have the same habits. the only difference is that i’m not in your life anymore. not because i cut you off, but because you distanced yourself from me so gradually and naturally that i didn’t notice it until i started rereading our texts.