i need to figure out why i keep wanting to isolate myself. for days now i’ve wanted to go to st. vincent de paul and buy cassettes and cds. i’ve wanted to go biking to the river and walking to visit my friends and just go galavanting around the city with all this newfound free summer time i have. but i haven’t. i’ve just been playing music on the stereo system, organizing my room every now and again, playing guitar badly, and thinking. existing idly. that’s not to say i haven’t tried, though; i went to the park and smoked a joint one night, but it ended in a self-deprecating spiral like it always does. last night i went to a club and it was the most horrifying teenage thing i’ve ever done, and the whole time i couldn’t stop thinking about how undesirable i am to men. why? it’s not like i care; or so i used to think, until i met one whose opinion briefly meant the entire world to me. it seems to be eternal, though i know it isn’t. this suffering feels eternal too. it’s because i know there’s nothing i can do about it. i just have to sit here and feel like shit. i can't pretend the pain isn’t there. it's always going to be, like the stain on my wall, or the broken floorboard beside my bed. so do i travel out into the world, and attempt to continue living a distant life, plagued by dull reminders of my perpetual failures? or do i remove all outside influence, and leave myself to confront them face-to-face? if i do nothing, it will not go away. regardless of action the thoughts will chase and chase to haunt me with what i did, what i’ve done, what i could’ve done differently, what role i played in this whole mess, what i would say to him, what i wish i’d said to him, what i shouldn’t have said at all to him, what my life is going to be like without him in it, what a horrible and disastrous state i have now found myself in, etcetera. all i can do is sit here and think about him, and hope to find a way out of this grief. or sit here and distract myself with artistic endeavours and endless chores and poetic attempts to dissect all my feelings, only to have the grief hit me harder than before. it feels like there is no moving backwards or forwards, only permanent emptiness. i guess this is why i keep isolating myself. to stop myself from carrying the pain down the street with me, or into stores, or into houses, or to the river. nobody wants to see the cloud of regret that follows me everywhere.