We Hurt the Same Black and Blue

I've been drinking too much. This is not an unique realization, but the fact that I've given myself alcohol poisoning more times in the past month than the rest of my life disturbs me. Generally, I only drink too much before a nervous life venture or when something awful has happened. It's a combo now. I'm home in Santa Fe for two months, looking at jobs and apartments in LA and letting my Missbehave responsibilities fall by the way side a bit while I wallow in a half sleep half depressive state. Kicking sand and staring into half-empty coffee mugs.

Drinking half bottles of Bourbon and spending time with my best friend Alex. I feel like I've been imprisoning him a bit. There are only a couple people here that I can stand at all. I've had a breakthrough in my quest to fall out of love with my ex-boyfriend Matt. We had one awkward sleeping-not-touching thing (where he insinuated that lovestruck me couldn't control myself around him) followed by him texting me after snorting some pills asking for help. I went to rescue him. Him, blacked out on a gallery couch. After an hour of coaxing, I managed to get him awake and angry enough to storm out where he stared at me with such drunken hatred that I told him to hit me. He didn't. BUT, and here's where my moral dilemma stems, the next day I told him he did. I told him my nose wouldn't stop bleeding for half an hour to see if it was broken. I told him next time he gets drunk and snorts painkillers to lay in his own puke and think about how awful he's been to people that love him. He had no issue believing this and told me he felt awful and loved me. Now he loves me. Only when he thinks he's beaten me, he loves me. He loves me but not in that way. It was a breakthrough on so many levels. He doesn't love me. He believes he is capable of hitting someone he "loves". I think I'm finally free! But now I think it's the loneliest place I've been in years and years. No one to love. Not even unrequited. Useless.

Now my mother is at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. She found a lump in her breast, they found another. She refuses to label herself a cancer survivor. She's already past it and she still has lumps and radiation and scalpels in her future. I'm scared. I don't know what I would do if I lost my mother. I always imagined that I would move in with the remaining parent and take care of them if anything happened. I always imagined that happening far into the future. I cry spontaneously at bars and in grocery shops. I might not make it to LA until February if I go to Minnesota with her for her radiation. I don't even know what I'm doing. At all. I'm faking it now. The drunk keeps me in charge but irresponsible, uncontrolled. I feel like I'm falling.