I've got to stop doing this. I feel like absolute shit.

Love is such a stupid, stupid thing. People falling in love with people who aren't in love with them, or in love with someone else. It hurts, it really does. I went away to the Prom, something planned for a while, with friends, people I know well, but who I can't reach out to. Late one afternoon, a day ruined by rain, we were watching a movie and this thing built in my chest and wrenched me from out there to in here, where the pain was and I couldn't be there anymore and I went to my room and wound myself round bedsheets and wept and unwound and snuck out the back door and walked, wind lashing, cold rain, a shoreline at dusk. The wind and sea made me feel real, grounded me for a while and I walked out into the deepening gloom and let the world swill around inside me, a cleansing, better than the things I made and held inside and when I came back ruddyfaced, shoes wet, I was able to drink wine and play boardgames, I was able to be bright and even funny, able to feel insecure about my general knowledge, able to feel kinda normal and this was enough to make it through that night, and the next day, until now, when my endurance has worn down. It's worst at night.

This is agonising. I didn't expect it to hurt this much. It actually physically hurts. It's like every time I love it hurts more when it ends, when the tentative outstretch recoils and lashes back on itself. All I want to do is lie in bed, curled up, crouch under a shower, eat bad food, listen to music. But I can't, I've got to do work and finish my degree, go to my job, talk to people. Two people I know have called me in the last couple of days, a coincidence - both broken up with partners, both people who don't call me that often unless they need me and usually I can give, but not today, not now, I just can't.

I didn't imagine it would be this hard. Falling in love with someone who doesn't love me - it's so high school, so ridiculous, so massive a pain for so silly a thing.

I'm wondering whether love is my addiction, whether it alone is the thing that makes me like being me. It's quite possible, really - this is withdrawal, cold turkey from a version of myself I'm happier with, from a heightened reality, from a fullness of being, and with her gone, the loved, I'm left with the remnants of myself and I find I don't like what I see, my well worn doubts. Maybe the addiction idea is just one of those doubts. I don't know. I'm getting tired of living like this, of being me, living inside out and sometimes now I find myself craving other ways of being, ambition, career, a willingness to care about people I don't know, one of these foreign ways of living, because living like this is killing me.

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See, this comes in waves and I can feel them coming on, and one has just swept through me and battered me and left me dry and rational again and I can stand to face the night, see friends and make brittle conversation and if I read what I've written, I'm slightly embarrassed - it's no longer my experience, it's the past and the future but not now. I know she'll read this and feel a little bad that she allowed me to attach myself to her, and I know that making even a little impact on her is why I've written this.

(from friday)