Control

Monday morning. I wake up naturally at 8.30, having gone to sleep shortly after midnight and slept uninterrupted. By 9.30 I am dressed, bag packed also with gym stuff, since I have a long day, Dutch class and the going out to eat with friends. I dreamt that I was riding a bicycle, alone, taking numerous risks, not unlike my rollerblading days, arriving at some derelict army base where I wasn't supposed to enter, at al,, dead ends, slopes, rounding corners, and I dreamt that P. told me I put on a few pounds and need to watch my weight. he was uncomfortable saying it, in the dream, that is, and I completely accepted it.

In real life, P. tells me I am especially pretty. He loves my body. But when I wake up from these Stokrin-dreams, they don't leave me, unlike real dreams, I carry them around as experiences.

I am listening to Evanessence's Evereybody's Fool as I type this, and the intensity of their music and the truthfulness of their lyrics matches my eccelerated heartbeat, my constant running around, my acute emarassment. I have reached the stage of considering myself a phony, a complete fake. I chatter nervously, I make faces, I flinch. I have somehow in my quest for control lost all control, and I feel like people are just phantoms in the periphery of my own frentic existence. I feel like an addict, hiding out.

When we left the Indonesian restaurant last night a woman approached us, she was tall and thin with long blond hair and a beautiful vacant face, made up, dressed up, but something just wasn't right. She was young, quite probably younger than me, but she looked old in the way surgically enhanced people do, when you can't place their age, and gave us the usual bullshit about having lost her bank card and needing to get to wherever, which usually comes from a much grubbier person, and did this with so much intensity, that she deserved money just for the acting. But of course she was a hopeless addict. And that's how I feel, a lier, a phony, a fake. Conning people into helping me, into thinking I can do this job, making contacts worldwide and weaving people into my net of deciept. And when I try to be sincere I feel an even worse lier, as if only I know the extent of the darkness within me, and only I know how filthy I am, and that I don't deserve to live, certainly not like this: clean-cut, happy, well-fed, well-paid, with a boyfriend that loves me and wants to show me to his family, and bosses that give me credit and actually let me carry on with this charade. And not because I have HIV, but because the HIV confirms everything that I have always thought about myself, and despite the HIV people don't realize (those that know) that I am hopeless.

Of course, there is s struggle inside me. If I really felt this way all the time, and there were no other voices to counterbalance this one, I would top myself.