oh i know, i know no one understands. i'm sorry i scared people - darlings it is not like that - i don't still want to - not now - and i have - i was - glowing for a while after the thesis but then i don't know - there is tiredness - and also the sense of having finished something big - and a kind of fear - and having foolishly hurt myself into despair with the past - and the sense of insipidity that lay ahead and - that wasn't it all - i can't - explain what it was - it is some of those things, and more, but not really any of them - and it came on me - that - i didn't want to try very much anymore.

but even with the part of me that understood simply that i was giving up, another part that calmly said, if you're giving up mind you do whatever you should do not to inconvenience people, which is why i have been sitting down to write cheques to pay my bills and making a list of who should receive which books of mine and bringing clothes and books and food to clothes and books and food drives. which is really just the - practical parts but - also - i was - accepting dinner invitations and really being excited about them as though i knew i were going even if in a way i knew i wasn't going. does anyone understand? that you can - want to - be sure you want to - die - and yet another part of you is really going on about your daily business as if there is no contradiction - as if you really will be here. still looking forward to - and still seeing a bright future - and still really - enjoying being alive - so that i can poll people on whether to buy a dress and make jokes and be my usual cheerful self and write journals frivolously - and really feeling all that, not simply functioning on automatic, and yet at the same time - knowing - in a quite different way - that you choose - have chosen - will hold to - oblivion.

it is - all - strange - it is over now - anything i say now - is - backdated. but when i was sure - i didn't - show it - the part that wanted to - be dead - was going about preparing to be dead quite calmly, and the part that was still myself was - living - going on - precisely because i knew about the other half - but now that i am sure i don't - and am quite - sure that i want to live - it's suddenly coming out in - not misery but a wish to - not even cry but to be sad and needing to talk in a - retrospective way. i was cheerful then, although i wasn't truly, but now that i really am okay, i feel incredibly sad and tired.

i don't at all make sense.

but the thing is, i really AM okay now. now. but all this - backdated - emotion - has to come out. for now.

oh what the hell this sounds worse and worse the more i try to explain it. i shall just - go and get food shall i? and do work. but please don't anybody start calling me or the university to find out if i'm dead. i am not dead and not about to be dead.