I can't figure out how to use this lately. I start and I stop. I'm afraid that I've ruined the part of my life I've spent with this diary and I'm hesitant to ruin anymore. I started listening to music again today, for the first time in so long. Music that isn't the same over and over songs from my walkman for the half hour or so I'm on my way to or from someplace. Here's how it is, I've wasted years of my life sulking time away and it's inexcusable. It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I stopped listening to music because I couldn't look it in the eye. Gosh, I feel silly saying that, but why should I? It's exactly what I mean. Everything has been like that, all of these little things like the way I stopped buying the Sunday paper and watching This Old House, the way I wouldn't let myself finish that book, the way I quit quiz and got rid of the accordian. The way I've slowly removed all of the small comforting things I used to keep piled around me, and no wonder I've been unsteady, I've been throwing all of my security blankets through the window, though some of them go on their own.

It's freezing in here because I never close the kitchen window and the heat shuts nearly off at this time of day. It's nice though, to get out of bed warm and go into the cold kitchen for tea, it sharps me awake and then when I leave the kitchen the rest of the apartment feels twice as warm as before. I feel like a better person when the weather's like this. I think that's what made me turn the music on. However distrustful and sullen I can be in the months prior, when fall comes I get friendlier and more optimistic. Sort of. I don't know if it's the dark or the scarves, but the closer to winter it gets the nicer everyone seems, and I develop a sudden patience for small talk. I smile more and stop looking for trouble. I say yes to things without dread. I've committed myself to a lot over the next few weeks, and I'm not looking for ways out of any of it.

Basically, I have a bad habit of deciding to start my life over and letting it slip away after a few days. How do I make it stick? Schedules and timetables and lists. Maps of the trip from the life I'm in now to the life I'm meant to be in. I don't know, I don't know, but I feel good and cold, I feel steadier than I have in a long while. The other night I had a dream that I drank hibiscus tea until I fainted up in the branches of a tree. I didn't think I even knew hibiscus tea existed until I dreamt it. All day afterward I wanted to faint. Some of the time that meant worrying I was about to and some of the time it meant thinking that fainting would help, somehow. Instead I flailed a lot and managed knock two different lamps over in one day. There were loud crashing falls, but nothing broke. Maybe that's how I feel now, like I can flail freely, like I can knock over all of the lamps I want to and nothing will break. That isn't it, really, but it's something like that. It's something good.

The phone interrupted me. First I had an hour long talk with Jackpot about snow and Spooks and more than a thousand tame deer, so that was pretty good. Then there was a call where I was passed back and forth and there were whispers and, "She sounds nervous. Don't be nervous." I am a lot of trouble I guess, but it feels nice to be nervous and not hide it. That is the plan, to be nervous and not hide it, to do things I'm scared of and admit to it. I'm back around to the first song again, and this is a lot of words anyway.