Like the Duncan Sheik song - "I feel a little undefined...I'm sorry if I seem so in-between." Sometimes I feel like my entire life has been lived in the in-between, that I myself am the embodiment of no concrete concept but only the rickety bridge, a swinging balance between conflicting ideas, and am neither for good nor bad, but simply exist. I laugh at my choice of the word "simply" there - verbal irony I guess.

I am the gray area between extremes - mysterious, undefined, uncentered.

Maybe it was destined. Even the astrologers can't make up their minds about me. Libra, some say; Scorpio, say others. And so I'm in that small group that is neither one nor the other, but on the edge between, the Cusp. A constant battle between reason and passion, carefully balanced scales against the impulsive, tempestuous scorpion's sting.

A part of me saw twenty geese flying in a V into the sunset and was awed for a moment; the other part watched where I was stepping as I left the pond, cursing the same creatures.

Appropriate, really, if I think about it, for a middle child. It's the paradox that births all of my hypocrisies. I can go white-water rafting or skydiving without qualms, but am unaccountably too shy to strike up a conversation with the handsome, friendly guy who sold me a Christmas tree.

The shy temptress, the sophisticated country girl, the confident self-doubter. Hopelessly lost and unable to admit it.

The thrill of adrenaline overcomes logic, or reason silences longing. Back and forth, one or the other - an inconsistent pendulum of choices, battles - maybe, really just the same old feud of mind versus body, old as humanity.

I don't belong here or there, but both and neither at once.

And yet, I don't buy that. It's too pronounced, too random, and, all too often, too devastating of an occurrence for me to chalk it up to the mere human condition that every person faces. As much as it is me, myself - my body, my mind - that is waging this internal war, some other part of me that detaches and observes and analyzes all of this notes, with dismay and alarm, how little control I truly have.

I long to fit in and despise conformity. I crave crowds and isolation, and find both in one.

It's as if my conscience and my hormones exist and act separately from each other and the inner me. They are unjoined and seemingly don't communicate to one another. Or me. It's as if the ambassador or translator that this State of Me was supposed to be equipped with was lost, or never arrived to begin with. What part of me was supposed to be the mitigator? My heart? It lies in a thick-walled fortress in whose cold, dark hallways the pulse echoes and fades away.

I cherish those that love me, and resent them for the burden.

Though, that, too, is open to interpretation.

Stretched so thin to walk a wire, and how can you not see through me yet?

This middling course of mine, this cycle of sometimes one, sometimes the other, but really neither - it occurs to me, if I am neither one thing nor the other, in any category, I am not anything. I am nothing. Two opposites added together cancel to zero, do they not?

I scatter myself so wide that I disappear and forget what I was. If I was.

Sometimes the only way to keep yourself from being torn in two directions is to choose neither. Go nowhere. Get nowhere. They have a name for this in churches (and yet another paradox, as I quote the theology I cannot admire): Limbo. Purgatory. A place of endless waiting, an in-between. Neither good nor bad, just simply existing.

I am nothing; I am in-between.

Again that phrase: simply existing. As if there was anything simple about it.

12/22/2003

Author's Note: First version, written at 4 am. Non-italics is meant to be read straight through and the italics are just there, in-between, with their own message - kind of cohesiveness of form and content. Heh. Ironically, or maybe appropriately, I am in-between about this one - I can't decide if I like it or not. Advice? Commentary? Anything?

Posted on 12/22/2003
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