I get to move around again today. I'm going down to London this afternoon. Seeing a familiar face is perhaps even better than going somewhere. This morning has been good. I thought I was getting sick, but took some Airborne, some Lemsip (as disgusting as it was), and some vitamin C last night and woke up feeling good. I had a good session with my counselor where we talked about how I actually feel good. And my mommy sent me a really good email. It's good to feel good.

Twelve and Holding is an incredible movie. I remember once when I was 18, in San Francisco visiting a friend and we went to see Igby Goes Down. He had been going through some things with his family, and the movie really hit him- hit him in a way that he was vacant when we left the theater. Going to the bus stop, he walked yards ahead of me and had nothing to say. And later made him tell me he never wanted to see me again. It all turned out fine in the end, but that movie must have been a little too real to go on ignoring whatever was bothering him.

My reaction to Twelve and Holding wasn't quite as explosive on the outside, but it taped on a lot of things inside. The story was thick with childhood traumas, and 12 yearolds trying to cope with their lives in ways that seem far beyond appropriate for their age. The specifics didn't matter so much as just seeing kids struggle in ways that I remember struggling. Most people don't remember their childhoods as a series of dramatic events- at least they don't express it- but I do. Remembering my life feels like a film. Like a fabricated story. I want to write it down.

This won't be long. It's 3 am and I have to document this feeling. I was feeling really really alone today, and I saw a little of how I do it to myself. I am always thinking about transitioning, and choosing to come out here first gave me the space I needed to get myself together, but now that a couple of months have gone by since I opened my mouth about it, I'm wishing I was with those who hold my history and are so much of my present. I almost spent loads of money to come home a week early. I don't care about how I connect or share things with people here as much as I care about everyone else. But "one is silver and the other's gold", I guess. I am really overwhelmed with the support I've gotten from so many people at home. Every home. I'm also feeling so much closer to them, and to everything. I want to let everything be seen. The spacer between me and everything else fell out and I feel alive. And I feel happy to be alive. I'm writing this now because I know I will have a few more rough patches, things will sometimes be tough, but I have to recognize for myself that I sometimes feel this way.

I'm not sure why seeing that it is November now hit me so hard this morning. My sense of time has become completely relative to what phase my life is in. Because I think so fondly back to last Spring, it seems like I've been programmed to think everything is happening in April. I think it is April now. But it gets dark at 4 in the afternoon and it's freezing outside. I wish I didn't feels so detached from the season, though I'm relieved I've even noticed I've been living like this because it's a sign that I'm getting back to normal. I've been living for some other time and this is where it's gotten me. Sometimes your vision's fucked up, sometimes it's not I guess.

The Gossip proved to be one of the best nights I've had in a long time. I forgot that I knew that band well back in the day. With the first few chords of the first song they played I saw in my head a distinct moment about three or four years ago when I was driving on the 215 freeway from my apartment in Colton into Riverside listening to some song of theirs. I was going to work, or to see mom, or to hang out somewhere. The picture is of me driving past the contractor's licensing school or the trailer store or the biker bar along the freeway on LaCadena. Remembering this made me partially relieved that I hadn't abandoned all recollection of that hugely influential part of my life. I was living with Nickolas- the love of my life. I made my first home with him and I still miss it. We came home to eachother- me lying on his bed while he translated songs and learned Spanish. The mangey cat I started to feed on the porch against his wishes. The livingroom we never sat in. My piles of stuff on the dining room table that bugged him. The guy who thought we moved out so he took my plant without asking. (We couldn't understand anything he said, so maybe not asking made it easier). How Nickolas let me park in the covered parking and he parked on the street. He had the truck then, and he got the car then too. We did The Fish when we needed to. I never did it willingly, he always made me and I felt better after. I was in love with someone then that didn't love me, and I was broken down a lot, but he balanced it out so I could get better. I can only hope to have been half as good to him as he was to me. Now he's in love with a beautiful man, and I have been off someplace else for quite sometime. It's no wonder my mind is in other places all of the time when I have things like that in places I am never in.

The other part of my mind went to the part where I was thick in unrequited love. I thought about how strange it was that that actually happened. Now, I can't think of reasons why I loved her. I don't think I knew what love was anyway, but I thought I felt it. I was 18 when it started and 20 when it was over. I stuck around for a couple of years hoping to figure it out, but I really just figured out that trying so hard was making me feel like shit about everything and feel small and silent. My ideas of what should have been happening were completely impossible and my ideas of who I was and should have been were so far off from what I actually wanted. I thought I had no choice. It blows my mind how much I suffocated myself and let other people in my life to help me do it. People change a lot and I feel like I can't even recognize what I was at 18. Wherever gratitude should go, I'm thankful to it for having moved away from all of that. And Nickolas is still my baby, and it makes me teary to think of him and think of how we're gauges for the passing of time in eachother's lives. He's seen all there's been to see in me since we were frustrated teenagers and all I have to do is talk to him if I wonder where I've been or where I'm going.