"Did you bring those chocolate bars just to bug me" "Oh hell yeah. I hate chocolate bars!"

There's something small inside me, right in the core of my body that that feels beautiful and sad. It's a dark lipstick place. A place that I want to retreat into when I'm filled with the overwhelming intricacies of the places and people around me. I want to pull them in my core and just hold them there and be consumed in this darkness. It's the feeling you get at the end of Fight Club, or American Beauty, where that music plays and you feel like you just can't support your own weight with the intensity of it all. And that music plays and the petals or buildings fall, and you feel like you've seen something real.

This weekend was real. This weekend was snow on the ground, guitars playing, story telling, emotionally real. And now I'm in that dark lipstick space. I've been falling more and more into these spaces of silence where I want to talk, and I just don't know how. I start talking and then something clicks off in my brain where I second guess everything I'm saying, or I start worrying whether what I'm saying is coming out right.

This afternoon I cried while I was talking to Matt. And his response made me so happy I cried a little more. I feel really lucky that I have these people in my life who will participate in these moments with me. And yes, I told him that I didn't think that he coped well with the events of the past couple of months... and that's probably because I don't know how to cope at all.

I suppose I don't think that other people can judge how poorly or well someone is coping because they have no way of knowing that person's true experience. I think that people deal with intense and traumatic experiences the best they can at a particular point in time. These methods are not always healthy, but they can still be effective for the individual. I think that telling someone that they have coped well or poorly indicates that they have some control. In my experience, when what you're doing can be described as "coping", you're just doing whatever the fuck you can to keep your head above water. So in that sense, if you're not dead or in a drug induced stupor after a traumatic experience or depression, then yes, you coped well. I suppose in saying that Matt didn't "cope well" I just meant to affirm that his experience was a difficult one and he dealt with it how he needed to at the time despite anyone else's standards of coping. If someone tells me they aren't coping well, I have no reason to tell them that they are. I'm simply here to offer any real support that I can give, and hope that when I need to be held up they'll be there with open arms (or possibly the offer to smack me for crying).