Normal
2002-11-26 || 5:55 p.m.

I walked down to meet my dad today. I could see him in the distance, patiently waiting for me, moving about a little bit as if he wasn't waiting for anyone and I just wished and wished that he wasn't getting older and he didn't look so worried and I just hate myself for hurting him because he's ill and I love him so much and I worry that I make his blood pressure higher and I just want to be 8 years old again, holding his hand and putting my nose against his overcoat and smelling his smell and feeling secure. I want to put my hand into his pocket and find a packet of cough sweets and ask if I can have one, knowing he will say 'yes' and unwrap the cherry sweet and suck it, folding the paper wrapper into very small squares and I want to smile up at him, feeling like he will always protect me because he lets me have cough sweets and he indulges me and no-one else does.

But instead he is worried about me. Standing on a street corner with grey hair holding papers, trying to to make sense of how his eldest daughter can make such a mess of her life.

I want to make sense of the world but I can't. I look up at the vastness of the sky and I see the cars taking people home. I look into their houses and see them sitting watching TV, cooking, talking, sitting alone and I just don't know how I even exist at all.

I want to know why I feel any pain at all. I have no right. I have no right to wish to be held by someone, to wish to be desired by someone, to be wanted and liked just because I am me. I know exactly what I am, I know the filth that is inside me. Others have always been able to see it.

I want to look at my arms and see the flesh that used to be there. The skin that was there when I was a child, when I really fucking liked my arms, because I did. I know it sounds stupid and strange but I always loved my arms, I loved the feel of them when I danced, the positions they needed to be in, the way my hands felt, how light and thin they are and how expressive I could make them and that's why its my arms I hurt. But instead I look at my arms and think 'well where the fuck can I cut now, there's no fucking space left'.

And I don't want to be that sad old fucker who thinks like that because I want to be someone else, someone normal and nice and kind and funny but I know that none of this matters because I just don't matter

But what I can't understand is why I feel the pain of someone that matters.

I can't understand that at all.

Maybe it's the ultimate joke.