You don't know. You can't possibly know. Not until you've been without a home, not until your only transportation is how far you can walk, not until you've tried to live off of twenty dollars a week.

So many people think that they've been there but they haven't. Not until their pants are tattered, not until their shoes leak, not until their every meal lies in question.

And they have so much advice too. Like everything hangs in the balance of simply being positive. As though simply believing you're going to make it, will somehow make it so. And I'm not saying that hope isn't important... that hope doesn't often times take us just those extra few steps that would have otherwise been impossible. It's just that, to truly be there, to truly be the friend, you have to be willing to take the sour along with the sweet.

Sometimes it's in being negative and getting it all out that we're actually able to continue on... we just need that person to vent around. To be ourselves, to be real... to gather the strength to then move on once again and be that strongest part of us. And maybe they don't even realize that they are the strongest part of us if they'd only help to lift us up so we could continue walking...

~ KT

It's so strange. You're out doing nothing or something you do everyday and then it happens. You see someone in a far off worse condition than you doing something that you're barely even able to do anymore--- living. And you can't help but wonder, what have they learned that I haven't? Or, more appropriatly, what have they learned that I have't allowed myself too? Because it is all a bit voluntary.

Or sometimes we simply scoff at what we learn. I do it all the time but I look at myself and I look at them... that person in a far off worse condition and I realize, the only person who can be scoffed at here is me.

~ KT

Do you know me? It's strange.... I'm not even sure that I know myself anymore. Everything is just so jumbled. Anger mixed with pain, pain mixed with longing, longing mixed with hope. And it doesn't make any sense. Nothing makes any sense.

I feel like maybe I'm selling life short. Like maybe I'm the victim of my own hopelessness. Like maybe, in the end, it will all add up to nothing and there will be nobody to blaim but myself. It can be so comfortable being the victim... and often times anger is an easier feeling than moving on. Moving on means letting go and letting go means losing a part of what brought you here in the first place.

Anger can be so motivational and having something to prove and actually proving it can create a bit of a purpose but is it a right one? And is it right to continue on with such motivations even when your realize you're really not that angry anymore?

When bitterness becomes a crutch it can be so hard to let go....

~ Kate Taylor

Just something I wrote a couple of days back....

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I'd thought about it so many times, you know? Walking out in the middle of the street. Just letting it happen. And never looking back. No regrets, no thoughts, no memories. But it's the thought of regret that had very well kept me from doing it. Would I regret it? I could never answer it so I never did it.

Could I have made them any more clear-- the thoughts in my head? And yet kept them all to myself at the same time. Maybe it's all in the timing but I guess the only thing that ever seemed to be made clear to me is that the timing was never right. So is this the right time? I guess, in a way, it has to be because there's simply no time left. At least not for me.

When I told you how I'd choose to die, I suppose I lied. Not in my answer but in the why of my answer. Cancer-- I'd always chose cancer explaining that I'd simply like the chance to prepair for my death, have time to right past wrongs, take back regrets and maybe leave a little something behind along the way. And yes, I guess that was a bit of the reason but most likely the smallest part of it.

It sounds selfish and wrong and that's why I'd always kept it to myself but have you ever wished to be just a little less invisable? Even if only for a month, a week, or even a moment? If you had, you'd have known what I was feeling. When you're dying people have to love you don't they? I suppose I'd always imagined my life to end in a sudden way almost like a slap to the face. I'd die and everyone would miss me only I wouldn't be around to see that they were crying.

See? Even now it feels a bit wrong to be typing it but what are thoughts without someone to share them with? It's nothing, that's exactly what it is and I guess in that, my life truly was nothing.

It's strange... how our darkest thoughts have a way of creaping up on us and becoming our reality. It was sudden, wasn't it? Only... I actually hadn't thought about this, not before it happened anyway. And now I find myself wondering exactly what I'd thought I would.

Is anybody crying?

~ Kate Taylor

August, 2007