need

my landlord really needs to turn on the heat.

I had a series of dreams last night that totally reminded me of what it felt like to be the youngest in that house--extraneous, shut-out, lonely.

I was enough younger than all my siblings that they felt it necessary, felt justified in closing the doors against me, even locking them with latches placed over my head. then again I learned to climb up on chairs. I learned to enter spaces I'd been denied when they were away. and then they were really away, all gone off to boarding school and eventually college.

I learned quickly to strike out on my own, to search farther afield for friends and allies-- and I found them-- I got good at that, became ressourceful at finding a kind of support in friends and neighbors' families. what I found there wasn't always entirely benign, but for the most part it was good.

there did stick--or never get sated-- a kind of chasing-after impulse-- an excessive hunger or need or desire to be regarded, to be attended to. and I'm afraid of the ferocity of this need. I am afraid, sometimes, that it is bottomless, impossible to satisfy after all these years and... experience. I try to hide this need. and so I keep to myself. I shut myself in and isolate. afraid of how deeply I need and feel denied by other people.


--

I want to find someone who loves the way I smell
and whom I love the smell of.
please.