7:10 p.m. - 2001-07-04
hypocrisy
Guilt was not an option in the world I weaved for myself. It could have been the Paxil that the psychiatrist who smelled like pickles prescribed for me, but I was suddenly carefree. The poems I'd written were still powerful, but I didn't relate to them anymore. Almost like I had become someone else, I looked at the past year or so with a detached sort of interest. I had to avoid the people I'd confided in, for fear they still saw who I'd been, rather than who I'd become. Plus, I saw the sadder me as a pathetic clinger, which was probably true, and I didn't know how to explain that all of a sudden I didn't need anyone anymore. I'd started to prefer that people need me, so I could see how it felt to be hung onto. It turned out that the medicated, newly hypocritical me had no patience for it.

How dare I, I thought to myself with revulsion, late at night after real life couldn't intrude in my musings. How dare I expect to be supported when I won't do my part in supporting? But it was instinctive, the push to be detached with Julia when she bounced up to me in the halls and told me she'd been burning herself. She pulled up her sleeve and showed me the marks, lamented for hours on end that she was losing her mind. Nobody loved her. She was an outcast, nobody cared. For hours she could do this, and my heart would not take any of her pain, or even empathize a tiny bit. Shit, I could at least fake a hug, tell her I care. But I was out of it myself, and I didn't understand, and I didn't care, and I wanted to go on with my life.

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