There's an uneasy feeling creeping up in my blood. It comes at night, when everyone else is asleep. when the only light on is the sickly bare bulb above the stove, when the only noises are the ones I make myself. It's not boredom or sadness but their bastard child, something worse than both its parents. It's not sharp enough to make me cry and not stifling enough to make me shake it off. Instead it wedges exactly halfway under my skin.

It all comes down to whatever thoughts are flashing behind my closed eyelids. None of my half excuses of words can put it in the real world. Once I tried to tell my mother. When she looked up at me from her grocery store novel her eyes were blank. They were smooth sheets of nothing glass and her lips curled sour around her teeth when she said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

I don't know what I'm talking about either. That's the problem.

Sometimes I like to think of ways to make it go away. I think of how I'd like to hold hands with a boy in my history class- long fingers, short nails, the skin tan and stretched over the tendons and bones. Sinewy, with the veins protruding. He moves them constantly, folding the fingers and twisting his arms to crack the knuckles; I wonder if he knows he's doing it. I wonder if he'd be able to keep still or if he wouldn't be able to stand it.

Or I think of driving away, putting everything I could fit into the backseat and not stopping, pulling into the gas station on only exhaust fumes. I think, even, of flying. Spending all my saved-up money on a plane ticket and landing in whatever foreign country I happened to pick out, closing my eyes and pointing to one on a list. Working, living simply, not speaking to anyone unless I wanted to. Making friends with someone who doesn't speak my language, and I wouldn't speak theirs, so we make up our own language of hands and smiles and I find I like it better then English.

Then I remember how it ends up if you hold onto someone for too long: the stifled feeling, the way the skin grows damp and the way the palm starts to feel poorly put together, grotesque. I remember the way a plane ride and a drive down a straight highway feels: like this, amplified.

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(from November 2008)