I have been in a mildewing haze of apathy lately. My veins run with cold empty uncaring and yet somehow, strangely, the muscles in my chest still clench achingly. (The Gemini curse.)

I've been thinking a while that I want a tattoo. My mother is fiercely against it, citing hazards of hepatitis c and a variety of other ills, but I am twenty years old and I don't need her approval and hepatitis c takes decades to reveal itself with symptoms and I doubt I'll care in decades. Courage, on the other hand, I need. A good bottle of rum beforehand, I need. A fucking clue what I'd get a tattoo of, I need.

Actually what I really want is a meaningful scar. But I have none of those and scarring myself wouldn't exactly have meaning in it, now would it?

I have a new plant. Actually, technically, I have a new tree. A beautiful weeping fig as tall as my waist and I've named her well. So far as I can see, my room this year will be low on personal items and high on plant life. But that is the way I need it.

I can't have children or pets now and self-imposed isolation is all I'm good for. Plants are all I can afford. In the emotional sense.

I like it when my head is this way. Numb and detached. Feeling nothing. I'll feel it in a month or so, of course. It'll spring out of nowhere and I'll have a good cry (alone, of course - visible tears are weak!and vulnerable!and scary!) and I won't be able to remember by then what I'm crying about. And right now I'll just feel nothing. Dead inside, I'm dead inside, that's what they all say. That's what it looks like from the outside, and, hell.

Maybe it's true.