11/19/94
Sunday 2:15 pm
Victoria
It's weird sitting here in your house - without you and Ugly is playing and Luke has gone to buy me coffee. It's all quiet and I've just been thinking how all of life's best moments are so short-lived but you can store them in that little paisley box in your head and take them out and wear them on cold rainy days when life's not being fair or you're just feeling sorts of lonely.
I want to thank you so much Vicki (!!!) for everything. Not just for feeding me and giving me a warm, lumpy place to sleep - but for being a fucking awesome person, too. You make me feel proud - and on the chance of sounding like your mother (I'm sorry) but I see you doing wonderful things with your life and your personhood. I was really worried about you over the summer - I didn't want to see you throw your life out the window. But you've grown up so much, grown away from Kristy to become your own. I'm so glad to see you being something. I've always sensed that bit of magic in you from the start. You take people in so readily and love them and take care of them. That's such a beautiful thing.
It's so hard for me to be wanting everyone here - to want to be with them and bask in their love and wonderfulness - but to know that I have to make myself something. I need college, I need purpose and direction even though it's tempting to just drift on other's goals and float on the everyday, but I know I must make my everyday. And then others can float with me.
I just hope everything will be good still when I come back to visit again. I can't even say when I come home - my home now is Boston even though those I love most dearly are here. Someday I'll go somewhere where I don't have to worry about leaving and I'll give myself without remorse.
Without being "superfluous" (ask Adrian what it means, and "vestigal", too...) verbose, long winded, and boring - I'll say good bye Victoria. I love you I love you I love you and always will. Keep the faith, keep loving, keep your feet on the ground but don't stop reaching for the sky 'cause you're a star and that's where you belong. Keep smiling.
LOVE FOH-EVAH,
Kristin Renee
*****
I found that, and black and white pictures of me that I can't figure out where they came from, and letters and set lists and photographs and notes my father wrote me in fourth grade and later on when life got hard and everything smelled like basement and I sat around on the living room floor at my mom's house and got lost in it. Scraps of paper and things I had taped to the walls and entire eras of my being, stuffed into Xerox boxes and blue and red folders. So that's what Kristin wrote to me - and here's the crux of what I was going through at the time, in between aching unrequited love letters and shows and blind-drunkeness (there's some good stuff in there too, really). It's from the other side of the looking glass, it seems:
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT I ATE ALL THIS ACID
WHAT IS MY SOMETHING ELSE?
What do I do who am I
seems all big and important
I
like a dancing chick
WHO?
There always has to be someone or something else to go back to in the end.
For the first time I'm not doing something for anyone else I'm doing it for me so why am I sitting here talking to myself I'm becoming
a
complete
vegetable!
And do what?
Figure shit out?
I need to hear someone else's praise to motivate me to do it why don't I just do it for MYSELF
I have to be me
Well, go ahead!
who's there telling me
I can't do it just BECAUSE
this is my mind ME
in the raw
can I handle it
because who do you really have in
the end of it NOBODY
you're in your own mind
(warp)
Constantly answering questions means you hear somebody asking... talking to yourself can really do you in!
My senses are so fucked up I can't hear the music
straight it's all so warped
don't know if I can handle it myself alone
who's down one me all the time I need to hear
about ME me me me
if me is so important why do i
I can't even finish a thought
melt into everything instead
look to everyone else all the time?
Why do I always hear someone asking
Why do I do everything I do
Crazy how the music sets the mood.
I'm sitting here thrying to figure out
what makes me ME and why and I
have no clue. And everybody else seems to
know what the fuck they're doing with
themselves why don't I? I think too much!
everything in life is for something/one else
like who am I writing this for and who's
going to read it and think what about me
Sometimes I can talk but what
is on inside my head?
Words mean so much to me
Why do I hear everybody else in my head
probably because when you're not on acid you don't
I sat here all day and waited and
I feel like everyone passes through
me going onto whatever they're doing and I'm
wa part of what went on in their whole
scene for the minute and then everyone
left to do soemthing else not just sit
and feel
my godddamn
BRAIN MELT.
Everything I start just trails off...
into what? Look at me from someone
else's point of view must be ok
Dammit why am I never me for ME?
(What do you mean by that? I don't know.
I am trying to figure out myself and I keep melting.
*****
Wow. Right. Do we see a pattern there? How about I drop acid in the midst of mental disarray and try to figure out my whole life? See, that's why I stopped taking acid all by myself before I turned nineteen, because I needed to be loaded to stop all of that, not make it worse.
Such a difference, from what I put out to what others saw.
And I talked about that last night when I spoke - constantly just trying to be what I thought everyone else wanted me to be, and winding up so frustrated and so confused. When you're doing that all the time, there's nothing really left to you when you're alone except for this impending sense of calamity that somehow, in some very crucial way, everything is All Kinds Of Wrong.
I could go on forever. But I have to go back to work.