I am restless, hedged in by doing an impression of an average person. Being with him is like the one breath I can take in between the times I feel myself asphyxiating. I don't know. Exam time always makes me like this--maybe it is the lack of sunlight? I don't know. I want to wrap myself like an ermine stole around the necks of the people I depend on and just live there until it is safe to come out again. These days, it seems everybody wants something from me--especially my mother. I don't understand why the things she says to me affect me so much, but they do. I bite my forked traitor of a tongue and count the threads in my comforter as she goes on and on, picking up and examining my fears with the careless expertise of a jeweler examining flawed diamonds. I imagine myself in Argentina, or in Charleston, or just maybe sleeping the days away, and I'm alright for a little, biding my time until my next breath. The twitch of his eyebrows as he tells a joke. Something...something. I deserve every unhappiness I get, I know it, for all the things I have ever done to people. I don't ever complain, do I? I just want to make everything right. I don't care if it's not right with me--I just want people to think of me as the reason for their happiness--not for their complications, or for their drama, or for their troubles. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night unable to breathe because I have so many things and people I must take care of--but isn't that alright? Doesn't somebody have to do it? Why do I always feel like I need to reassure myself, if I know I'm right? I feel guilty sometimes, thinking to myself that there must be a reason why people around me are unhappy, upset that I can't do anything, seeing only the things I say and do as the common thread. This is, naturally, ridiculously unreasonable. I dont enjoy portraying myself as or feeling like the shoulders for the world's burden's. So why do i still feel overwhelmed by guilt, underserving of the one truly good, no strings attached, no hidden secrets person that heaven has gifted me with? I glance in my mirror and my eyes are darkening with the thick, brooding melancholy typical of my age genre. It makes me sick to my stomach, disgusted with myself, unable to look at my reflection (I've covered it with a scarf)that I can't be secure and let things be as they are. That I have emotions at all. There are no answers, I guess. I only write in this thing when I'm feeling extreme emotion....yeah, and I guess I am, but it's not bad. I am happy--truly, genuinely happy. I just wish, sometimes, that nine thirty pm would stay that way, nine thirty pm, and i would lie on your bed watching your face lit up by the glow of your screen for as long as time stood still. Counting the breaths i took between minutes ticking away. Immersed in the warmest, most safe feeling I have ever known--achingly, breakingly aware of every keystroke you make that brings me closer to having to say good night. Living my life is sometimes like being pushed face first into a bucket of ice water. "Wake up!!!" they scream at me, and before I can tell them that I am, that I'm happy, that I want to be simple and easy and free, that I don't even need that much, they push me right under again. Glub.