her_name_rhymes_with_a_kind_of_hammer raze i guess she decided if she could make it seem like she needed saving but didn't want to be saved, if she could present herself as that kind of wounded creature, then she could attract a certain type of antihero, and she could make him her puppet, take what she wanted from him, and then leave him to choke on the taste of his own hard, dry tongue after sucking out his spit without her lips ever touching his. the problem is, sometimes puppets remember they're people, and when you pick them back up again after a long estrangement, you might find they've laced their insides with razor blades, to give your fingers something to remember them by. 140326 ... raze and then the whole truth, or something close to it, exploded all at once. emotional atom bomb. boom. and all the things i couldn't quite figure out now make perfect sense. she erased me from her life not because i'd done something wrong, but because she could go on lying to him, or she could go on lying to me, but she couldn't go on lying to us both and forever keeping us in the dark about each other. that was too much work. so she chose not to tell anyone the truth. she ran away from one of us and went on feeding lies to the other, hoping he wouldn't one day find himself compelled to do some digging. but now he knows everything (no thanks to her), and i know everything (thanks to him deciding i had a right to know), and we know all about each other. i feel for him. all i did was step on a land mine i was never meant to find. i'll write a few bitter songs, the limb i lost in the explosion will grow back, and i'll be fine. i'm already fine. he got hit with the whole nuclear blast, and i can see the mushroom cloud it made from all the way over here. i can pity her, or hate her, or feel whatever i want about her. he has to try and find a way to keep loving her. and that's going to be a project. the strangest thing in all of this was reaching out to him after he reached out to me and getting not hostility in response, but wit, intelligence, and basic humanity, slicing through the pain. we would have been friends if we'd "met" under different circumstances. i'm sure of it. but she robbed us of that chance. at least i can stop combing the internet for an obituary in her name. she's fine. i should have known black cats always land on their feet. 140327 ... raze the first dream she showed up in, back when i thought she was who she seemed to be, had her stepping out of a door in the ground in the middle of an otherwise deserted downtown street, tall, narrow buildings all around, all of them a soft pastel shade of green. the grey pavement between and beneath them was smooth and unblemished. she looked hesitant, easing herself up through the door onto the empty road as if she didn't want to wake the sleeping city. i still don't know what that means. but i feel like it means something different to me now than it did back then. 140328 ... raze she hadn't shown up in any of my brain_movies in a long time, but she's making appearances in small supporting roles now, working her way back in there, as you'd expect her to. one time she was just words on a screen. another time she was a webcam model who never made any money. some people want to type things at you and tell you what to do and not pay for anything, but that wasn't it. she didn't get paid because she wasn't any good at it and no one was watching her. she danced around with jeans and no shirt on, and it didn't look a lot like her but it was, and no one was watching but me, and she didn't know i was watching, and i felt the way i guess you'd feel if you were watching something awful on television and you were too bored to even change the channel. liar's comeuppance, you're a strange scenario. would you drive to guatemala if i told you where to go? 140329 ... raze now she's just a story i tell other dream characters, until i've told it so many times i begin to tell it in a language i never learned to speak but suddenly know well enough to swear in, until i tire of telling the story and she's not there at all anymore. i always thought it was interesting how someone's manifestation in the dreamworld is influenced by your experiences with them and your feelings about them in life. heroes become villains become heroes again, become spanish curse words, become out of work actors. and then i suppose they make a bunch of cheap straight-to-DVD movies with names like "i fell in love with an evil marmoset on thursday" and "fifteen things i love about hating the fact that i could be in love with you if you just changed your hairstyle". 140403 ... raze i want to erase every word i ever said to her, and every word she ever said to me, to be rid of whatever is left of what never really was, and i can, and i will, but first i'm going to eat breakfast. 141204 ... raze they have a kid now. the kid's something like a year old. i hope for the sake of the kid she's a better mother than she was a friend. i can't remember the last time she showed up in one of my dreams. she's not even someone i swear about to strangers when i'm asleep anymore. the fate of the damned. 151004 ... raze hadn't thought about her in a long time. then she showed up in a dream the other night after a long absence. it was just her voice. she called and left a rambling message. i couldn't make sense of what she was saying, and i woke up before i could get through the whole thing. later on, in a different dream, someone yelled up to me that she'd called and left another message. true to form, the dream ended before i could listen to it. there probably weren't any honest words in there anyway. 180203 ... hazarding a guess ball peen? colleen? 180208 ... raze bingo. 180208 what's it to you? who go blather from