The night makes me feel free and new and unmasked because it takes away the things I hide during the day, but it also makes me vulnerable and scared. I get this pit in my stomach, the kind that makes you want to rip out your intestines, and I have never been able to identify exactly what I feel. Maybe it doesn’t have a name; maybe it cannot be translated into words, but it rips and tears away at every piece of me until I am bursting and wasting away in the same instance, tears streaming down my face. It makes me so angry when I don’t know what to say.

I’m supposed to be the keeper of words -- I always have been, after all -- but now, more often than not, I find myself muttering “I don’t know” or getting frustrated because I can’t express something the way I want to. I didn’t even understand what an “existential crisis” was until a few days ago, but maybe this is part of the problem.

The aching in my head argues that I would do just fine staring at a wall for all of eternity, maybe contemplating some deep philosophical question, maybe just sitting there. I am one life out of seven billion human lives and the odds are against me here. It is more likely that I will amount to nothing than to anything at all, so why am I putting myself through Hell to keep getting nothing over and over again?

I can’t even ******* write about my problems, I can’t do anything except let them stew inside my head and poison my brain cells one by one because their complexity is beyond me, in numbers as large as the stars in the sky and the shards of glass in my heart.

Deadlines are catching up to me, and before I know it, I’ll be taking my summer school exams and getting my wisdom teeth out and starting school, and oh God, if I can’t survive in my own bedroom how am I supposed to make it in the pool of Great White Sharks? I’m not good enough for anything, especially not for my own standards, so it is easier to paint the works of Monet (the sunsets) on my forearms and across my thighs because there will never come a time when I will not be worthless. How am I supposed to write letters to my idols about how they helped me (they did, I promise you they did) when I’m still falling apart, when the rips in my seams and the holes in my skin keep getting bigger and bigger as days and weeks and months fly by. Why do I keep disappointing the people that love me -- I’m so sorry, I’ve always been a disappointment; I disappointed my workshop teacher when I told him my secrets, rushing out of me like the tide, but quickly withdrawing back into myself. When he told me he wanted me to get help, I was convinced that I would. And then I came home and realized that is so much simpler to take the pain and live with it instead of trying to explain it to others. I can’t even explain it to myself.

I want to know the cause, I want to know what made me this way. Was it genetics or my weight or some traumatic memory from my childhood or was it a small museum of relics donated by private families, collected over time until you could walk the halls of my suffering and drown yourself in me? What made me snap? When did I become so open-minded and when did I discover myself and why do I wish that this mental illness wasn’t just teenage hormones because I want to be special? I just want to be special. I want someone to hold me and comfort me and tell me they love me and I want a shoulder to cry on that can kiss me inside our blanket fort and I’m afraid I’ll get so tired of waiting for my soulmate that I’ll leave before they have a chance to find me. And I’m afraid of how far my dreams will take me before they are outpaced by money and power and glory in the race to the finish line and I am afraid of how I will take the loss. I discovered long ago that my dream was to live in San Francisco, by the bay, and own a bookstore/coffee shop, maybe with a record store, and live above it or in a townhouse near it with my husband and my four kids and maybe we wouldn’t be rich, but we would be happy and I could breathe in the sea salt air and finally feel like I am home instead of feeling like I am a misguided ghost trying to find my way back to my own graveyard.

Somethings never change, like the twisting feeling in my stomach as the clock moves closer to 3 am. I wish I knew how to stop it.