The Marie Celeste

Another day of over over over. Overeating; tomorrow will be better. I must work harder. Ich muss schwerer schaffen um mein Ziel zu erreichen.

I think I am falling for so many people at once, girls and boys. I find it easier to write of the girls, because they're forbidden and so... it's more of a flame, knowing they're unattainable. I suppose this is the way with many things; my weight. Other's perceptions of me.

I am starting to like her less. To adore her less; I do not think that she likes me in the slightest anymore, but I am ceasing to care. Maybe she will again in the future. I don't know. I used to feel, when she turned her back to me that I wanted to go, and hold her and kiss the nape of her neck. I can remember that desire, and something turns in the base of my stomach from the memory of it, of that flip... but it is only a memory. There are new ships on the horizon. Love, well, adoration unknown, is like... the Marie Celeste. It hovers on the waves waiting for great expedition, but is lost somewhere along the way or dragged by undercurrents; once it wanders into that territory, that intransgressible state, I never know how long it is until it returns to my life, the feel unchanged but someone new at the helm. I haven't got a choice; I am bound to it. I magnetise to the harbour every day to wait, to wave it back in. Sometimes it returns. That time is now.

The captain rested on my shoulder and leant her arm against mine. She has got a boyfriend, who she appears to love; so I do not think she will be so interested in me. We are great friends. I have told her my fat secret. I think she is wonderful; I don't have eating anxieties around her, and she doesn't compliment me or tell me constantly that she likes me, but she just is reassuring and kind. She said, once, "Thanks for being so kind and youish". Substitute my real name for you. That badge of appreciation glowed on me for days. Really, the reason I like people is because they make me feel needed. Everyone is a narcissist, aren't they? But I can't stop my self obsession, so I'll just wallow in it.

If I was a captain, and if she was waiting for me... she would look for a long rope of cable hair, all in one line, falling from beneath a tricornered hat I cannot stop without. She would touch that dint on my belt, just over my hipbone where my musket should be, but it has gone with the crew and with everything else. I am caked in the sea, in that salt that should wash me clearest clean to a crystallized gem, but instead I am fried, seasoned, baked, seasoned again so that the mould from last year, the year before... are all ingrained into me, as a map, creased into the very sockets of my eyes. Here, here is Constantinople, and that is an island noone saw save the seven savages and the sharks, and there is she, a constant memory behind my layers and layers of years elsewhere. She says I look sickly, and I think there has never been such a spirit as she, a spirit alive within a husk of a woman for all of these years, the shell worn so thin and papery I can almost see those courses of woe beneath the translucent browned hessian of her skirts. I adore her the more for adoring me, for waiting, and it is easiest to pretend that she adored me all the time, that the fragile leaf keeping body and soul together withstood the pressures of the earth for all that time and trembled only for I to smooth it out into a pale line pressed between two sheets, kept pure and old for my looking.

I suppose that's a bit My Last Duchess.