>>From: Belacqua
>>To: Perdita
>>Subject: it's fucking SNOWING
>>Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000

Oh my holy son of a fucking bitch. The first thing I do when I wake up every morning, for some reason, is look outside to see how the rest of the world looks, and I look this morning, and everything is white, and it doesn't sink in right away, but it fucking snowed last night. It didn’t snow a whole lot, mind you, maybe a quarter inch, and it's already starting to melt, but it's so fucking weird to see snow here at all. It snowed. Wow. And on top of that, no hangover! There was a not-so-pleasant price to be paid for that one, but the fact remains that I am hangover free. I'm having one of those times where I know I'm heading for trouble because that's when I wake up and want a drink. Even after drinking and getting sick, I still want a drink and I want one now. But I never give myself one until after noon, and I don't know if I'll give myself one at all today. To say I overdid it last night would be a serious understatement, but I guess that's what I get for drinking with normal people. I just get so fucking spiteful when they try to pull all that normal person shit on me. Since they obviously can't feel what I feel, I want them to see the amount of physical pain I NEED to put myself through to try and escape my head for a little while. So, passive Belacqua was gone last night. When my friend started that "suck it up and be a man" shit, I just fucking lost it. Usually, when I get interrupted when I'm talking, I just stop talking and let whoever interrupted me go on, but not last night. It felt so good to yell at someone and somewhat justify myself out loud even if they didn't hear a single fucking word I said. Then, when I got up to my apartment, I was sitting there staring at the TV screen, and instead of thinking, "I need to talk to somebody," I was thinking, "I need to talk to Perdita." And it was so great because I knew we'd see things the same way and you'd understand why I was so upset and so drunk. I really want to thank you for talking to me at two in the morning and for being there in general.

Everything looks so uniform when it snows. The same cold, lifeless blanket is covering everything, and you may as well be on the moon for all the plants you can see. It felt like I was waking up in a new place this morning. Unfortunately, this new place is just like the old place, except it’s whiter. Oh well. It was exciting for a moment, anyway. I really need to take my medicine. I'm so fucking pissed that a quarter of the Buspar I take every fucking day fucked up my friends so much, and I don't feel shit on it. That is hideous, cruel twisted irony. Goddamn normal people.

Anyway, I hope your day is going okay, and I really hope I didn't make you tired all day today. I feel like going out and renting a billboard and putting "I MISS YOU Perdita" on it because that's almost how big it feels, but I could just use the money for that on a plane ticket, so that's kind of silly.

I love you so much, Perdita.
Belacqua

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>From: Perdita
>To: Belacqua
>Subject: Re: it's fucking SNOWING
>Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000

Belacqua,

For the first time in god knows how long, I actually caught myself up on all the shit that's been sitting on my desk for weeks. I'm sure part of the reason it piles up on me is because I know it's so goddamn easy that it'll take me about three seconds to do, so I just say fuck it and toss it to the side for awhile. It's just like my French homework in high school; I never did it because it was too easy (christ, did I get in a lot of trouble for that). Then I get this huge pile of shit on my desk and I stare at it for weeks and feel guilty as hell without actually being able to DO anything about it. And lord knows I've been feeling so shitty lately that I haven't been able to do ANYTHING, much less WORK. But for some reason, I'm crazy productive today, so I feel relieved like you wouldn't believe. It's the dumbest thing in the world. It took me about an hour, maybe two, to do all the shit that's been bugging me for weeks. If I actually kept up with it all, I'd probably barely notice I was doing work. But alas, such is the life of the hopelessly lazy and depressed: constantly staring at roadblocks and just trying desperately to wish them away.

I can't believe it snowed by you. I'm so fucking jealous. I LOVE snow, and I've just been waiting for the skies to open up and dump a shitload of snow on us up here, but it has yet to happen. Realizing, of course, that you didn't get that MUCH snow, I still can't help but feel jealous. I think I mentioned to you at some point that snow just makes me feel so CALM. Everything gets covered like the sound of a muted trumpet, and it all seems so much less threatening to me...unless I'm driving, in which case it's a totally different story.

I'm glad to hear that you feel somewhat better today. I'm also glad to hear that you realize waking up needing a drink is a bad thing. Christ, I've been THERE. I swear to god, my entire freshman year at school is just one big blur. I spent the majority of my time drunk and then crashing on Susan's floor. During one of my drinking binges, Susan and I went to Rhode Island for a road trip, and we stayed awake drinking and doing god knows what for five entire days. I got back to school at about seven in the morning on a Monday, and I was walking back to my dorm room blacking out on the sidewalk. I got those lovely little doorways of blackness just opening and closing in front of my eyes for what felt like forever. That was also when I decided that I didn't need to eat since I was drinking so much, and I would get to the fire door to go to my wing of the dorm, and I wouldn't be able to open it because I was too weak. I'd just lean on it and hope the pressure would open it, but usually I just had to wait till someone else came by to open it for me. What a wonderful year that was.

I'm glad you yelled at your friends last night. Obviously, it's never really fun to have to yell at anyone, but sometimes you just HAVE to. I mean, jesus christ, the entire problem with normal people is that they really seem to think they CAN understand. There's a passage in one of my older journal entries that says something about how people can't tell me they know where I've been unless they can show me their scars (and a lot of other shit, too), but that's what I love about you; I KNOW you have those scars, and I know what forced you to that. It's a goddamn evil force, and just because it's intangible, people think it's not real. But that's a load of shit if I ever heard one. I know your pain is real, and I know how much it sucks to be constantly around normal people who don't know one goddamn thing about what you're talking about, and yet they'll claim till they're blue in the face that they "understand." Yeah, well, fuck that.

Well, my office is having a holiday party today, and it's about to get started with free food and wine, so I'm off to that. Thank god for wine. And I can actually drink it, too, because I'm leaving work early to go to the therapist. If I was staying at work, I'd be very hesitant to drink at all since it totally fucks me up something awful and then I end up sitting at my desk hating the fucking planet for the rest of the day, and I'm just not prepared for that right now.

I love you.
Perdita