Guts N' Teeth.

"After all, underneath
Ain't we all just guts n' teeth?
Ain't we all just reflections
Moving in separate directions?
In our heads, out of our minds and out of time."

http://www.oldmanmarkley.com/Music.html

There's something going on again with me where the internal pieces seem to be having trouble fitting together. I feel like it's some sort of internal pangea that just refuses to fit- too many years wearing away at the edges and undoing the symmetry with which they used to fit together.

That's poetic. And kind of gross. But I was talking about guts here, wasn't I?

The work I do is emotionally overloading sometimes. I take on the emotional burdens of other people- of rape victims -and it's amazing and I'd never have it any other way, but while I'm an expert compartmentalizer, I seem to be losing my touch. Which worries me.

I think sometimes I'm kind of astounded by the fact that I survived losing my mother. I don't talk about it much, the act of losing her, although I'm starting to talk more about her when she was alive than I think I ever have since she died. And it's the good things too- funny memories, good ones, things she did right. I'm refocusing and it's made it a lot better. But I guess when this sort of thing happens, it's like little earthquakes, releasing pressure from the plates so I don't explode or implode or whatever it is I'd do if I didn't. I'm new to this "let it out" thing.

But sometimes I'm acutely aware of the rip that's still there inside of my chest, and it shocks me. It's kind of like re-realizing it. "Oh, yeah, my mother..wait, she's gone?" Sometimes I look at the things I wrote in the first months that I was living here- I wrote religiously, with white-hot fervor after she died -and it's some of the darkest, most disturbing shit I've ever read. About being dead on the inside and making a good show of hiding it from the people around you.

I don't talk about it, but when I first moved here, I mean in the first few days, maybe a week...I was convinced that I had died and that this was hell. She was alive in Alabama, but I had died and this was my eternal punishment or whatever. Convinced. I wonder what that means about my ultimate mental state.

I'm okay. I promise that. It's just that this happens every so often where I can't quite fathom the reality of the situation.

I'm happier than I've ever been in my life and I'm finally starting to accept this and slowly but surely heal, but I guess this is the thing I was afraid of, the thing that kept me from ever staring at it head on. Because I knew this would happen. And I knew I would have to accept it.