and all the pink rubbed off his nose

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day... "does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you"

*

Lunch today is orange juice and strawberry cake with buttercream frosting, which is leftover yesterday's birthday cake. No, there is no significance to that at all - how should I know if Ludwig van Beethoven liked strawberry cake or any cake at all? If you want to know it was the only Duncan Hines box cake in the cupboard and some Sundays you don't feel like messing with flour and butter and eggs and ovens, even if it is the anniversary of the birth of one of the most dynamic beautiful and extraordinary composers of all time. You don't feel like doing much at all.

I cried half the night and woke up this morning with my hands agonizedly tangled in my hair, which doesn't make much sense because I didn't have a nightmare because I didn't dream because I haven't dreamed in weeks. But it mostly means I am becoming a rubbery flubbery mess again and the weather this time has only a little to do with it - the sun has after all stayed out two days though it's very cold and snowy which makes it hard to run away and I think I really really need to run away. Home has become a close stiff place I don't know how to breathe here and walls don't seem to understand a Profound Emotional Disturbance like a tree does. Apparently someone is looking after me because when I woke up I found a note on my dresser that bubbled optimistically "Hello Christina I dicided it was time for youy check-up you seem to be doing good so I'm going to let you pas the check-up test well I bid you adoo toodles Your's Truly, Check-up fairy", which was so disturbing and obviously false I am going to hunt this fairy down and demand a second opinion. I would like to know why I keep falling to pieces, and after that she can tell me why my hand eczema which I thought stopped eleven years ago has come back but only on the back of my left pinky, and why I only chew on the fingers of my left hand, and then why I can eat nothing for a week and the next am starving every second.
And why for some days now I haven't stopped clenching my fists long enough to play the piano.

I would like someone to teach me to be good now.

***


Of course the tree falling in the woods makes a sound. I have never understood that question, it sounds like one of those stupid things David Henry Thoreau would say.

Henry David Thoreau, Dad.