So I had a mini-mental breakdown last night. It started out that I just was bored out of my mind and no one was online, then turned into a shitload of missing Jeremey bullshit, then it turned into everything. I had just given up waiting for anyone to come online and make me feel better and resolved myself to listening to Matchbox Twenty and lying helpless on my bed when Chad came on. About five minutes into that conversation, though, my mother came in here (her room, where the computer is temporarily located) and forced me off line. This made me go INSANE. I couldn't bear the thought that I was forced, once again, to go lay in my room and stifle my sobbing into a a pillow, lest any sort of loud expression outside of that should attract attention and indignance. I couldn't stand anymore the idea that, aside from in the written word, I'm not allowed to express myself at all in this house at all, at least without being questioned as to my mental health. And I couldn't stand that whenever I cry for help to anyone outside of the house, no one seems to hear me.

So I went to bed, crying and contorting my body the way I do when I've lost a little more of my mind for the night. And the tears in the dark were running into my ears- a desperate, if somehow refreshing feeling- I realized that know one ever helps me in times like that because I cannot ask anyone specifically for help, I send out there really vague messages and hope someone will pick up on them, but generally I send them in a way that people think it's okay to ignore them. And I realized that this all comes from some self-image shit I have going for me: I don't think I'm important enough to ask for help, or I'm afraid that no one else will think I'm important enough to give it. So I have to send out messages and hope that someone will give it to me of their own free will.


Freshmen year, I thought about suicide a lot. I wanted help. I send out signals to a lot of my friends, but they were bitterly rejected. Desperate, I ended up writing a lot of shit in a notebook- a poem about suicide, drawings of people dying, and a "note" written back and forth to Serena- I was telling her what to write so I could have two sets of handwriting- that was making obscure references about how I'd been thinking about doing something bad, and how there were some people who I thought could help me, but I didn't know them well enough to ask. I went to the library, where Max worked, and left it there purposely, in hopes that he'd find it and have to read it in order to return it.

He did. And in his consequent actions, he saved my life. Even in the moments since that I've wanted to die, I've never stopped thanking him for that, and I've never stopped admiring him as a symbol of someone who was willing to do what they had to for another person. Someone who saw enough in me to go out on a limb for me- not for his own reasons, the way I feel some people do sometimes, but merely to keep me safe.


When I realized last night that I didn't think enough of myself to clearly ask anyone for help, it was not long in coming that I began to make the connection that no one else must think of me the way Max once did, no one else must think me worthy of making an effort to notice the signals. It was at this time that the phone rang. I looked at it for a moment, barely willing to hope it was for me, but crawled out of bed, despite telltale way I knew my voice would sound, and answered it.

Long story short, Chad saved the part of me that needed to be saved last night. I fucking love him.


After I got off the phone with him, I was amply calmed down, so I put on the TV. The end of "Dirty Dancing" was on. A year ago or so, I actually wrote Elorza an e-mail specifically about how happy the end of "Dirty Dancing" makes me. It's such an amazing ending...the romance and the bravery and the insobordination...and the romance. It's credible and incredible at the same time. I could write infinitely more about it, but I really don't want to devote a long time to that, because this is a post about Chad, despite that he was only mentioned twice, and about Max, despite that I haven't talked to him for years, and about people in life who leave me speechless.

Which is clearly demonstrated by all that shit I just wrote. On with it. :-)