the habit of being

I eat a breakfast of tootsie rolls and leftover Thai food, sitting on the floor with my computer and a smattering of tootsie wrappers, cd cases, books I’ve tried to start reading, what few dishes I still have. It’s been three days since the moving van disappeared, and I can’t say I’m dealing well. I’ve been on the phone with people I haven’t spoken to in ages, people I’ve never spoken to at all. I’ve downloaded three file-sharing programs and actually learned how to use two of them, one of which is nothing but a black screen you type commands into. Trying to fill the void, which seems to fill up the entire apartment, constraining me to this one spot on the floor I’ve been sitting in pretty much every moment I’ve been at home since he left.

This doesn’t even seem like the same place anymore, and that girl I used to be has been replaced with a manic post-breakup cliche. I talk to my mother a lot, and Jennifer sends me emails saying I can be so much more than just someone’s girlfriend. I genuinely want to Just Fuck Someone Else, and I genuinely want to call him up and beg him to come back, and I genuinely want to sit on the floor all day long and just cry about it, until I can’t anymore and then maybe it will be out of my system. I am not just writing a story about some fictitious and not-very-interesting character who’s just lost her boyfriend of five years; I actually feel that crazy.

I’m listening to, alternately, Sheryl Crow’s If It Makes You Happy and Tool’s Sober.

I haven’t started doing any of the things I’ve been putting off doing until he left.

. . .

I asked my mother what people did when they were alone and she said they ate chocolate and read and got careers. I’ve eaten a whole pint of chocolate ice cream, plus the tootsie rolls, but I’ve started four different books only to abandon them without even bothering to put them back on the shelf, and I really don’t think I’m cut out for a career. I don’t think I could work 40 hours a week without having a nervous breakdown.

The bothersome thing is, I don’t think I ever wanted a career. I never had any real idea of what I wanted to do in college other than read books and learn stuff. Back then James thought I was well worth supporting, so I think I mostly envisioned my future self sitting at home writing all day and being loved. Which probably has a lot to do with my mother thinking he was such a bad influence.

And maybe the whole reason I made him leave was because he refused to do that, or pretend he ever wanted to do that, anymore. I resented him even making me pay for my own groceries. I think I honestly have no desire to be independent. I never even learned how to drive. I’ve basically been setting myself up my whole life to need to be taken care of.

So what - I’m supposed to be this big liberated empowered modern woman feminist or whatever and all I really want to do is be in love and get married and have a baby? I’m not even twenty.

I’m good in school and artistically talented (my mom said the plumber came to work on the shower and saw my drawings on the wall and said if he could do that he sure as hell wouldn’t be fixing pipes for a living..but what am I doing with it.. absolutely nothing) and I can write and I’m relatively pretty and, despite the fact the I pretty much threw my whole life away for a guy, I still have a family that loves me and, in short, have a whole lot doing for me, I am sitting on my floor half drunk crying because the guy I spent all the energy I could have been using to do something with my life obsessing over has finally gotten out of the way.

This is all so, so wrong. What happened to me?

Is there a way to revert back to the person I was before I turned 16?