I have this thing - and in the beginning I thought it was kind of a normal thing, but eventually started to clue in that it's more like a defect. I know that everyone has to deal with loss and heartache in their lives - some more than others, some sooner than others. It's inevitable, and as we get older it becomes something we are faced with more regularly, so we all develop our own little ways of coping. So far, my special coping mechanism has been to completely and utterly refuse to deal with death at all, but now that a fair amount of time has passed, I'm starting to think my plan might not be the most effective.

You know how some people like to have photographs of lost loved ones out on display in their home, or maybe at work, or even in their wallets? Other people listen to certain music over and over because it reminds them of the dearly departed. Some people like to keep something personal of their loved on them all the time, like maybe a watch or a necklace. All of these people choose to have daily reminders of the people they miss, because they enjoy thinking about them and keeping their memory alive. I think this is wonderful, and very healthy, and have no problem with it at all, as long as it applies to other people.

What I personally like to do in the way of remembering special people who are no longer in my life is to make sure there are no photographs of them on display anywhere, even in places where I might accidentally stumble upon them. I also try to not listen to any songs that remind me of those people, which means having to HASTILY change radio stations, or remove certain music that I really like from my iPod. I also do my best to not think about those people for colossal amounts of time, like say, more than 30 seconds per thinkage. And the reason I do these things is not because I wish to rid myself of these people, but simply because I can't take the grief. I mean, right now, typing that one line made tears instantly spring forth and shoot down my face, which is humiliating and inconvenient any time it happens while away from my home, and can even be humiliating and inconvenient sometimes in my own home.

I do not wish to be The Girl Who Cries. I did not used to be The Girl Who Cries, and I dislike the lack of control over my emotions that has developed over the past couple of years. That is not to say that I am always crying...I'm not. But in order to avoid always crying I had to make a plan of action for myself (e.g. absolute refusal to voluntarily think about Sad Things) so that I wouldn't accidentally start bawling at inopportune times around any and all people, which would eventually lead to me becoming The Girl Who Cries, aka The Girl Who Makes People Uncomfortable, who eventually becomes The Girl People Avoid Because She Might Cry At Any Moment. I mean, I would avoid that girl, so I expect everyone else would, too.

By now, I should be able to talk about the people I love who are gone if I want to, right? SURELY by now I should be able to look at pictures of those people and smile, remembering good things about them and their lives. I am not a special case who has had to endure overly traumatic and excessive loss - there are people who have been dealt heaping amounts of grief and unfairness in their lives, who have been forced to survive losses so great that my brain can't even fathom the pain, and yet, most of these people dig down deep inside themselves and find the strength to not fall apart every time they think about something that punches them in their grief bone. Which is why I think maybe I'm faulty.

I'm concerned that whatever part it is we are supposed to be born with - the part that helps us eventually become steady after the violent rocking a big loss causes - might have been left out of me. Like there's some kind of iron bar located just to the right of our stomachs that our innards grab hold of whenever we start to feel emotionally wobbly, but mine never developed, or it fell out into the potty at an early age. It turns out that no matter how many anti-depressants one might shove into her cheesecake-hole, medicine does not make an inner-iron bar sprout into place.

So now I am left to wonder how long I'm going to be this way? It can't be forever, because there are still so many people that I love, and I have to face the fact that I am going to lose a lot of them in my lifetime, which means I need to go ahead and restore myself back to full health, like in a video game, so I can be better prepared to handle bad things when they come, because THEY ARE COMING. My emotional immune system that is supposed to help fight kicks to the gut is really low, if the fact that just last night I cried like an idiot when surprisingly faced with a photograph of my Dad's recently-killed dog (DOG! Not even a person! A DOG!) is any clue. So what I am in search of is some of that stuff that other people use to make themselves not cry as their knee-jerk reaction to sadness. Anyone know where I can get some of whatever that is? When all my tiny friends cried after Bambi's mother (SPOILER ALERT!) got killed, Tiny Me didn't even get misty. I watched Terms of Endearment as a young girl and felt nothing. "Beaches" did not make me cry, it only annoyed me. I want to go back to being like that - cold and black-hearted. How does one achieve that without doing hard time in prison?

A few months ago, I happened to peek inside the plastic lid of my convenience-store cappuccino, and noticed something floating at the top. Not overly concerned, I pulled the lid off to take a better look, and then realized what I was seeing was a very drowned gnat. While I wasn't exactly happy about this discovery, I'm not the type to have a complete fit over it (however, if it had been a spider, then the earth would have shaken off it's axis from the freaking out I would have done). I sadly poured out what was left, and threw the cup away, not allowing myself to think about how much I had drank before I found him. I figured the person who was filling the cappuccino machine probably had to keep one eye up front on the register, and just didn't see the gnat fly into the well before they closed it up and turned it on. Shit like that happens, we just don't usually know about it, and we survive, so no biggie.

After that, I noticed their cappuccino was becoming less and less flavorful, and more like sugar-water that had a teabag dragged through it once or twice, so I stopped buying their cappuccino altogether. A few weeks after that, on a day that I was probably extra-sleepy, I decided to try it again. I didn't open the lid until I got to work, and when I took the first sip, I found that it was all watery and nasty, so I decided to pour it out. When I took off the lid to pour, I noticed something floating at the top.

This time, it was a brown ladybug-shaped creature that was only about 1/3 the size of a ladybug. Still, he was a bug. ANOTHER bug. In my cappuccino. So I said to myself, "Self? That's the last time you buy cappuccino from that place." Which is why this morning when I needed to fill the car with gas, I drove out of my way to a different station, and went inside to buy a cappuccino while the gas was pumping. They had Amaretto-flavored stuff, so I jumped up and clicked my heels together with joy, and filled up their largest cup size. On the way in to work, I slowly sipped the wonderful, non-watery concoction as it guided me through the rain and fog that was fouling up the traffic.

When I got to work, there was still some left in the cup, but it had gotten cold and a little too thick with flavor, like the mix had settled in the bottom, so I decided to pour the rest out. I pulled the lid off, and what did I see? Well, of course, I saw a rassin' frassin' BUG floating at the top. So, I had to make another decision, since simply changing stores obviously didn't solve the problem, and that decision is to stop looking into my drinks. I simply do not want to know. I've probably consumed many, many insects in my lifetime that I had no idea about, and they have not harmed me in any way that I am aware of, so I'm taking the "ignorance is bliss" path, because until I saw the bug, I had really enjoyed the hell out of that cappuccino.

I have been haunted all day by a dream I had last night. This is not new - for some reason I remember most of my dreams vividly for days afterward, which wouldn't suck that much except I'm prone to having nightmares basically every night. The really horrible ones can stay with me for weeks or even months, which is fun.

Last night's wasn't one of the worst ones, but it has left me with a terrible feeling of guilt that I can't seem to shake. In the dream, my mother had died, and when my uncle came to me to discuss the funeral arrangements, I told him I didn't think we should have one, because I'd already had a funeral for her a year before. It seems that the previous year I had gotten a call that my mother had passed, and right after the funeral I found out she had not really died. For some reason, I kept it a secret, and a year later she died for real. I was too humiliated from lying to everyone to have another funeral, because I didn't know how to explain that I had been keeping her to myself for a whole year.

It probably has something to do with January 20th coming up, since that will be 2 years that she has been gone. But dreaming that she didn't die is not new for me...I dream it all the time, only in lots of different scenarios. I do the same thing about Charles' brother, except when I dream about him, it's always me finding out that he didn't die in the crash, but that he has been hiding out from his horrible, wretched skank of a wife and couldn't contact anyone for fear of blowing his cover. I'm always so happy to discover him, and I can't wait to tell Charles. By the end, I'm planning ways to bring him to our house, and then arrange for his sons to come see him so that he'll never have to be around his wife again. I sure wish it was true.

I know they are both gone. I'm not actually in denial about any of it, I just wish so often that things were different that I guess I'm flooding my subconscious. Or is it sub-conscience? I have a hard time with that term. Anybody know of something I can get over the counter that allows me to sleep without dreaming?