Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

I can't sleep and it's all your fault. That's what I want to tell you, although if I was going to be grown up about it, that point is not entirely true. You are just the genesis, my relationship with you bringing to the forefront various other issues that were probably due to come up anyway. Next month I'll be a year older, and I am starting to feel like there are some things that are never going to happen if they haven't happened by now. I don't know whether such issues would be rattling around in my pretty little head if I hadn't had fallen in love with you, but you can't unfire a gun, so we'll never know.

Of late, I keep trying to approach happiness with a spirit of entreprenuership, where life is a meritocracy in which I can get what I want if I just make the right moves. I do think that eventually, my hard work will pay off in certain arenas. I do plan to make a exceedingly comfortable life for myself, with a large living space, a booming business, a healthy body, and lots of dear, life long friends. But I won't be young forever — indeed, sitting here after missing an entire night of sleep, I feel worn and old already — and as my friends pair off and in some cases, start families, I am going to find myself a little lonely, because I won't have found that person who is going to put me first. And it's not just the romance I'll miss, although that's nice. It's that I'm not going to have that person to lean on, and so I'm going to spend a lot of time holding my posture tall and straight, being sure not to tilt to the left or the right, because if I tilt too far, there may not be anyone there to catch me.

I feel like I missed the boat on the whole adolescent courting ritual central to the human experience, and you certainly don't make me feel any better when you learn there are certain things I haven't been asked to do, certain acts I haven't performed, certain numbers that are almost tragically low in modern culture, and you tell me I need to dress sluttier and go out more. When I tell you that one, I'm not really looking for any more one night stands and two, that I have, in fact, completely given up on meeting someone all together, you look down and change the subject. I can't tell if you're sad for me or you just don't care, but I must say it is a great relief to not have you flatly reassure me that there is some one special out there who is waiting to sweep me off my feet. I can only assume that this is because you know what I know: that there are plenty of perfectly nice people out there who ultimately die alone.

Also, you may have deduced that if one more goddamn, well-meaning person attempts to comfort me in this manner, I will most likely take their head off.

So all this has been weighing on my mind since New Year's Eve, and in the past couple of weeks has really taken a toll my ability to sleep. Last night I tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable as my inability to quiet my mind translated into tense and twitching muscles and eyes that refused to stay shut. Combine the personal drama with several dozen open loops in my professional life and you have a recipe for disaster. In attempts to quiet my nerves this past week I've drank, smoked, and engaged in other unsavory habits failing somewhere on the continuum between rock 'n' roll and animal sacrifice. The only decent night's sleep I did get is when I decided to take drastic measures and guzzled down a shot of cherry flavored cold and cough syrup, although there was nary a symptom to be treated outside heartsickness.

I obviously cannot make that a habit.

I feel like the initial rush of intimacy that framed the beginning of our entire friendship is fading away, and I know that part of this is that we having nearly nothing left to talk about — I know nearly all your secrets and you know nearly everything there is to know about me. I know another part of it is that when you ask me what's new, I want to tell you that these circles under my eyes have their origin in runaway thoughts about you, that I think about you all the time and that it is stressing me out and I would like it to stop. I want to tell you that just when I've convinced myself that my feelings for you are more high school lust than high drama, you show up and despite my best intellectual efforts I get a Pavlovian two-punch of adrenaline rush and heart palpations. I want that closeness back, because in my world it's the closest thing I've got to the real thing, and the great irony is that my longing for the real thing is taking my next best thing away.