My eyes are tired from crying.
The rollercoaster up and smacked me from behind, I should have seen it coming, should have known that my guard was down so low I was walking disasters through my open door.
Up at 6am, no sleep, talk all night with the german boy then too caffeinated to sleep until my alarm rang.
Day at the redneck waterslides, screaming children, not the laughing screaming kind, the kind that screams because we ran out of candy for their fat little mouths.
But the sun was high and hot for the first time in a few weeks, the sunburn feeling good, hitting the waterslides and wandering about in a swimsuit and blue-on-blue sarong.
A strange too-freckled man told me that I walked like an angel in the grass.
I felt the sunstroke on the ride home.
I wandered up the stairs to an appartment full of bandmembers that my inner terrified-little-girl ego is convinced dislike me. Except for David and Kaff, but...
So many people, so much sunstroke, I bade my hellos in a daze of sunlight residue, bade my goodbyes moments later, too tired to wonder if I'd actually said anything polite to welcome them into my home hours after they'd spent themselves there for the photo shoot.
I stole a nap, the german boy arrived shortly after the crowds left, woke up in time for shower and actually finding a skirt to wear to the show.
Then. -- euphoria. Stunned and awestruck by the talent that I'd only heard the horror side of, I knew the mistakes they made in practice sessions, had no idea what they would sound like, though... And I rode the proud high when the audience screamed and screamed and they ran out of encores.
My boy was up there, and my girl, too... And the crowd was screaming for them.
They had to play "Misty Mountain Hop" twice, and both times it was brilliant. No, different from brilliant, it was impossible. Impossible that it could sound better than I remembered from all those high-school car rides when we'd play the Led Zep albums over and over in our brand-new automatic-flip cassete-players.
Afterwards, though, I was wasted. Too tired to think of clever things to say, didn't have the alcohol rush to help me. I was driving, David was tanked already, so it was complimentary coffee from a flirtatious waitress.
David was lost, lost to alcohol, I though, lost to the rush, lost to his childhood friends from Otterburn come to congratulate him and stare strangely at his tattooed girlfriend.
I didn't realize that he was upset with me... Upset with my slightly-too-loud laughter, upset with the way I carried the tittie jokes slightly too far.
I flirted with Kaff because she is delicious and beautiful, because it made her smile, because she is just that perfect warmth and shape to slip me from my daze of exhaustion and emotional wear.
He thought I was being distant. He stopped putting his hand on my knee.
So I laughed louder, screamed more, picked on Kaff's harem of italian boys, made it just a little too clear that I was turned on by shenanigans.
On the drive home, he was too quiet, and I couldn't pull it out of him.
This is the first time I've been so in love with someone so afraid to talk...
By the time we snuck past the german boy on the couch and sat on my bed, there was nothing left between us but my tears and his accusations, asking if my joke about the perfume was out of pettinness.
Pettinness. A man I've loved for nearly eight months now, asking me if I made a joke at his expense in front of his friends, as a jab because I was angry.
The one thing I would never do... That I thought he knew, he knew I would know better.
I spent the night shaking and sobbing, trying to make sense of his inability with words, trying to understand why I was watching him sleep three feet away from me, leaning over the edge of the bed as far as he could go.
In the morning he asked me what was wrong.
I don't even remember any of the questions, there were barely any answers, he never has answers, just blame and faulting himself so that he can be depressed about conflict, or faulting me for being unreasonable.
Oh I try so hard to be rational... Try so hard to think before I feel.
But I was tired. Three hours of sleep holding up two days of constant activity, and all I could think was "I can't do this anymore... How can you tell me you love me everytime we collapse together, and still think that I would hold grudges or pettinness..."
"I guess I have hang-ups" and he shrugged and fell asleep and I raged, RAGED that maybe he's a coward, maybe giving up is all he knows.
So talented, but he's afraid to write his music down, afraid to book more shows, afraid to do anything.
It's over soon, no matter how hard I hold out my heart to him, he's terrified of long distances.
We made love this morning, lying side by side, his arms encircling me from behind so he couldn't see the tears streaming to the sheets.
I was saying goodbye, not for now, not for the next few weeks, but I know that it's goodbye and my heart is breaking, and I think it's going to be the last time.
Because I'm not worth the risk, not worth standing up to the standards he's memorized, because it's the same story as original sin, babies are taught to believe in it, and he believes the standards that broken people live by.
If we'd been married, he said, he would have asked me not to go. That was his only solution. I asked what a piece of paper could possibly mean, and he shrugged, the same way that a broken parochial school student shrugs when you ask her why she believes in god.
He has a good heart, such a beautiful heart... But the shell, the shell is broken.
I stopped looking for shells, stopped looking for beautiful people, eloquent people, people with COOL tattooed on their foreheads.
I was just looking for hearts, but I don't know if I'm strong enough to live without any packaging.
Broken, broken... All my hearts are broken.
And I'm just tired.