2004-03-14..9:44 p.m.

Michael emailed me Friday with a desperate bid for me to edit his dissertation. It�s due Monday. I said yes. Like an absolutely fool, I said yes.

You know, I really did think I was over it. That was the first time I�d heard his voice since leaving Kingston, and I still felt that stab of � something. I don�t know. Anger, resentment, exasperation with myself, irritation with him, that humiliation when I was finally clued into what I was letting him put me through, that horrible grovelling hope that I could somehow change myself enough to make it all right. There any number of negative adjectives, and I can�t come up with any of them that adequately put it into words.

What�s worse is that I�m not sure if it still DOES hurt, or if I�m just remembering how hurt I was. That�s the separation I can�t work out, so just want to keep screaming FUCK HIM FUCK HIM FUCK HIM to drown out the white noise in my brain. At the time I sort of stopped eating without realising. It just occurred to me that that happened again today. It�s so draining. I lost nearly twenty-five pounds because I wasn�t strong enough to expel him. I was just pushing my dinner around my plate wishing I had the gumption to tell him, Please do not ever contact me again because you are a wanker who will never thank me. Which is another thing. I don�t even have the balls to tell say, YOU�RE WELCOME when he didn�t say thanks for helping.

I keep making little screechy hiccupping noises. Trying to quell this almost loathing I have for myself for getting pulled in.

R. said that he thinks I am over it, or I was, but that this outoftheblueness dumped me in. It�s temporary. It is.

Fuck him. I hate that he makes me so angry. And he�s so oblivious to everything that he just takes it for granted I�d do it (and I did. Fucker.), doesn�t feel the need to appreciate it (at least verbally), and swans back off because fucking *mle* is going to be in Glasgow tomorrow, so he REALLY needs to get it done. If I ever had a reason to write out the story of our year in Co-op and have it become monstrously famous and successful and read in classrooms and lecture halls across the globe, it would be just to get my own in a public medium. Expose the petty futility of it all.

Which just makes me even madder, because now I�M the one being petty. It�s a neverfuckingending cycle of bitterness and resentment and bitterness some more. Well, I wish nothing but the best for them and hope Karma gives me a big fucking payback.

Not one person of the five I broached this with (with all the sheepish lack of conviction of a ten-year old who�s just broken the neighbours window for the third time with his baseball and hopes he might get it back) thought he was justified in asking my help. Not one person thought I shouldn�t tell him to go fuck himself. Unfortunately not one person told me how I could do that. So I didn�t. Which is why I�m now all cross and bothered about the whole fucking thing.

You know what I realised the other day? This will either make you laugh, or make you cringe that I�d come to such a thing after a whole fucking year, but: his smell, his own little scent that I carried around with me like a shield when things were good and gripped the life out of when things weren�t. It�s the same smell of an unmade bed. With old sheets that have been wrapped around the same body for three years, and despite the warmth and familiar and comfort and fuzzy, they�re still peppered with crumbs and residue from the sponge baths that an underpaid nurse comes in to do once every two days.

It came to me as I was walking past the gas station near the bridge around the corner from my house. Someone had dumped an old mattress against the wirelink fence that�s all vin-covered and has deflated silver crisp packets poked through the mesh. As I was passing, a guy was going the other way, so there was this sudden waft of deodorant and rotting mattress, which trailed a bit in the damp before disappearing. So that�s it. Gillette and discarded, rainsoaked beddings.

If I had worked this out before, I�m sure I�d never be in this mess now.

What is even more shit is that all of this has quite extinguished the glow I�ve had since yesterday morning when I was invited to write for an online music magazine. My first deadline is the 29th of March.

I will sleep tonight and wake up remembering someone wants me to write for them and go to work and try to listen to Roar on the radio. Promise.

(also, the American Drummer Boy is online! It takes the edge off if nothing else.)