My time here is… limited. I want to write, want to create, want to program and draw and feel my way around the edges of the studio, slinking in to art and leaving without a trace. I want too much, and it's pulling me in every direction at once, balancing out and leaving me motionless. Desire. So unclear to me now. I, myself, me, is so unclear. I look into the mirror and just see a girl. No, not even that, a body. Just a body. Nothing reflecting my mind. I get such urges for change. For Dave, for WILG, for course 6 and setting up a server. For new piercings or new hair. For things that can't be undone, and repercussions unknown to me. I would like to have one thing, just one, only one, no more no less, to focus on. Is this why people like religion? Any reasonably intelligent human has the capacity to realize it's horrible destructive power, and yet the pull for a focus, a cause, is it strong enough to overcome that? One god, no more no less, one savior, one crusade. One reason to live, one ultimate thought. One. And I have none. Or too many. It amounts to the same thing. I have been writing a lot lately. Partly spurred on by Laurie's reaction to my email. That stream of consciousness thing I didn't even read over before I hit send. I didn't want to read over. Before she even talked about what it meant, she said I was a very good writer. Was I correct in my thinking, all those years ago? I lose the depression, I lose my muse? Maybe what I'm feeling now is because I had my One, and I lost it. My One was just as brutal and terrible as a God, only more socially unacceptable and stigmatized. Perhaps I was living to fight depression. Perhaps I was living to prove myself wrong, to hide that part of me. Perhaps the medication, therapy, understanding, really *have* worked, and what I'm feeling now is the absence of my One. I am not sinking anymore, I am just lost, floating in a sea, free but blind and not knowing what to do. I am like a newborn child, everything warm and comforting that I knew has been stripped from me, squeezed out of my mother's womb by muscles more powerful than I. But just like a child, it needed to be done. Once outside I can no longer survive in my old home, and continuing to live inside for too long would kill both me and the mother. But unlike a newborn child, I have no excuse. I am an adult in this world, one full of children who were born a long time ago and have experienced the way of the world. I have only seen the world through a window in my mother's belly, guiding, pushing, pulling, but never interacting. Never stripping off the latex gloves before. The world has no mercy for me, and though I am not alone, a group of newborns cannot much help each other. It will take time, time, to find my wings and learn how to fly, and I will fall many times with no one to catch me, but it must be done. It must. I'm just afraid I will get too close to the sun and my wings will melt.