Pieces of I

I’ve realized…

I have no one.

That’s not entirely true. I have a good handful of people that I love. My roommate, my two childhood best friends, my two adulthood best friends. My family.

But each of them only has a piece of me. A piece of the full picture, never complete.

So, I as a whole picture, have no one.

Becky has a mother, father, brother, sister. She has a supportive loving caring family she talks to nearly everyday. A relationship with them she has yet to see anywhere else. But there are pieces of my soul even they have never seen, despite watching it grow. How do I tell them about the emptiness that grows by fractional inches every passing season? Or about being in lust? About how much I love them and need them, but how much I need independence from them? They are number one in every book I can ever create, but how do I tell them that sometimes that one feels like a rope, tethering me to them at the strangest moments, and then choking me with guilt and remorse the next morning?

Bex has two best friends she’s known since middle school. They confide in her as much as she does in them, but for a long while, I was a third wheel. I was last to know, last to ask. We would do anything for each other and we’ve already been through a lot in 10 years. But sometimes it’s like we’ve morphed into completely other people who can’t deal with each other. When did we become parts of the wholes we used to hate? When did I resent you for assuming something out of me that I would’ve done in high school but have grown from? When did I not want to open your messages so that I wouldn’t have to face the loneliness I felt as you found a lover forever or for a year? When did our comments become generic and exclamation point fake so that we didn’t have to try to come up with an answer that wouldn’t offend you or scare you or anger you? When did I become peacemaker? When you grew a mind of your own? When you moved away? When I moved away?

Part of Deanna is from high school. That part is the part that thought her best friend from choir turned pseudo-sister moving in with her in a city 1,300 miles from where they met was a good idea. That part will always and forever unconditionally love you. But that part didn’t know the other part of you. I didn’t know you were capable of annoying me, that I was capable of complaining about you. Yes, I had gotten glimpses of it on our vacations, but living with you is different. I don’t hate you for any of it, it was just unexpected. When did you become judgmental and impulsive? When did you become the friend at the party who drank too much and said too much? When did you become the stubborn child and when did I decide to stop placating you? Is it because you were an only child? Doubtful. Is it because you can’t take shit or other opinions? Is it because we met in high school, when we were young and trying to fit in and still finding ourselves?

The other part of Deanna is the part that formed a connection so sudden and so strong with two people she’s afraid of losing as suddenly as they appeared. This part of me has honestly been the most true to I. We’ve cried and talked and laughed and become so emotionally attached I’m not sure if I can’t stand us or if I love us. You’ve called me out and I’ve flared in anger. You’ve let me believe things I don’t want to because if I do I change everything. We’ve broken trust and pieced it back together again, haphazardly, on eggshells just in case the next time it breaks, one of us is gone for good, but definitely not for the better. I love that we can be weird, but I hate that we can hurt. In less than a year, you’ve both become a huge part of my sanity that even as I sit here writing this, I’m talking to you both, and sitting here in loneliness.

And yet...

I have no name. I can’t go by any of the ones I’ve just described. I have leaked out every once in a while within the roles I’ve limited myself to, but I have never seen much light of day. That may be because I only fully come out in moments of weakness or brazen impulsivity. Or because I only am fully shown in the darkest parts of my mind and soul and night. I am a mess. I cry and yell and punch myself at my own stupidity and psychosis and words and actions. I’m the one who overthinks everything I could have possibly done wrong even if there is nothing. I’m the one who feels the empty hole in my chest that I believe I have no right to ask God or the universe to fill. I’m the one who gets so bored with everyday that I hibernate in isolation and am still unhappy. I’m the one who hates picking up my phone to answer a call or a text or a snapchat just in case the blatant lie of my life and will and happiness rears her ugly head and makes me hate the person for proving that I don’t know what I’m doing. That I don’t know who I am or what I want. I am a mess of emotions and darkness and hope and love and loss and regret. I remember everything I’ve done wrong, everything I’ve hated myself for, and everyone I’ve lost. I sit in tears of love and pain and joy and indifference. I hope for the love of someone I don’t know if they can love me back. I crave the attention of someone I have no right to attach myself to. I lie to the ones I love most so that they can never see the worst parts of me. I lie to myself, to every single nook and cranny and piece of me that I can so that I never have to face that I am not always happy or okay. I tell others to tell the world to fuck off, to love themselves while the tiniest voice in the back of my brain asks me if I even believe it. I am no one. I am the culmination of all the faces and phases of me that i’ve ever shown the world or ever hidden from it. I write this with the face of that part of me. I write this with the full blown up high definition picture sitting in front of my face, telling me that I need to tell someone, anyone, that I am more than Becky, Bex, Deanna. That no matter how close the Deanna of today can get, she is not me. The Deanna of today is perhaps hiding less than even the Deanna of five years ago was, but she is still hiding. She doesn’t allow herself to shut off, to let in the emotions that have plagued her for as long as she can remember before they come bursting out into a torrent of insanity that in retrospect was over-dramatic and unnecessary.

Even still…

I am aware of my mess. I don’t like to admit to it. I want to share it, but even the action of doing that would be an act of desperation. I don’t want to share it because who would I tell? Who wouldn’t be surprised by the hurt and the hate and the dark? This is where I have no one. This is where I clutch my head to make it go away, to numb it, to cry silently for five minutes and then leave it there to dry and disappear. This is where I hope for another life that is not mine, where I create goals and aspirations to make my life better for myself, and where those goals and aspirations go to die. I am the melting clusterfuck of my love and indifference for myself. I try to sort them so when they attack it is easier, but somehow, like my sock drawer, those drawers never stay neat, and they hit me with the force of a fatal punch to the heart at once. I try to escape it, but its bite always finds me. I try to face it, but I can never understand it. I try to give someone else the blame for even a piece of it, but I’m lying to them and myself.

Some of it has made me stronger, some of it weaker. All of it is me. I am going to enjoy the light while I can before either Becky, Bex, or Deanna puts me back in my steel, quadruple locked cage.