When I come here to write my thoughts after a few days, so much emotion bubbles up from under my surfaces. What do I want to talk about? What do I want to keep? Is it this particular feeling, this lovely, almost purring desire to hurt myself near the anniversary of trying to kill myself last year? Or is it something else? Something better from this year? A positive feeling from the last few days? Something encouraging? A let down? A fucking bird I noticed? Something I cooked? It reminds me a little bit of when I was in therapy earlier this year, and when asked anything, I'd just start crying, even if it wasn't the kind of question to be crying about. And then, having to be apologizing for the stupid crying. 

Almost every time in the last year at my parents house there have been coyotes. Coyotes stopping to look back at the end of the driveway. Coyotes ripping up the back of a feral cat no one seems to like, but that my mother feeds. (The cat is actually okay.) The first night I was there, the coyotes woke me up in the middle of the night around 4am. They didn't sound anything like the other times I've heard them - they seemed almost mournful, grieving, and bizarre. Every interpretation - that it was not the wild, almost insane joy of their breeding season, that they were cold, that they somehow knew that the back property is about to be developed and they will shortly have no home - was more depressing than the last. Sven woke up too and moaned and growled softly. He's a little afraid of coyotes ever since that time at Elkhorn. 

I didn't sleep well much in that place. I dreamt, I woke, I slept and fell back into the same dream. I woke up again and fingered myself back to sleep. I woke up hot and tired, puffy like I had been crying even though I hadn't been. 

Manassas is a chewed-up piece of gum that has lost all the flavor. It's deeply depressing. Everything is so ripped out and replaced with some kind of tired cardboard duplex version of itself, some kind of incredibly tiresome thing that it actually becomes literally exhausting to have to look at. You want to let your eyes slide into a kind of tired unfocus and move over the landscape of strip malls and chain stores, feeling utterly nothing. Sometimes I try to tell people how it used to look before, in the Manassas of my childhood, and I feel almost insane, like the way I feel when I try to tell people about interacting with my crows. Like it sounds fake and made-up, something with the polish of a little exaggeration in it. 

Did you know there was a fox that used to follow me around and I would bring it cheese? There was a gentleness to the landscape once. At dusk, particularly in the deep summer, the air softened. The shape of the trees smudged like charcoal smeared behind the bramble at the edge of the fields: barberry, blackberry, catbrier, and honeysuckle. Purple, dark, and gray, filtered gold. I believed the woods there smoked, the same way the trees of the Blue Ridge mountains exhale isoprene. They were somehow possessed of a sticky loveliness. And they were mine. 

And, well, who cares, huh? I feel mean, low, and peculiar.