Goddess, I'm bored.

Every day I wake up and wonder: how am I still in this grey place? When first I came, after things by the water fell apart, I thought I'd only be here a year or two, back to green and light and ocean before I had time to fall starving for it.

But it's been--how I shudder--near half a decade since last I left the desert, save for last spring when my grandmother died. Four years of slow strangling--

(suddenly the image fills my head: We cannot get out, reads Gandalf to the quavering Fellowship, and his voice echoes in the dark cavern as drumbeats well up from the Morian deep--and if you're lost at this point, you should stop reading now)

--four years of dull jobs and floundering deeper into debt, every day my head full of dissonance as the local citizenry stare at me, with my hair shorn far too short to please them on a woman, and frown at my too-free speech.  This place is clenched fist-tight; one tires of keeping one's mind closed to match it, so the wrong words don't come out. 

And I'm so tired; tired every day so the mental muscles shake with it.  Tired of hiding, and yet there's no way not to hide without becoming doomed to eternally repeat explanations of the obvious.  Tired of hiding, and yet there's no choice but to smile brightly and lie and lie, lest the boy who singlehandedly dragged me out of a depression full of glittering whispering knife-edges find out the truth of how little I truly care for the life he wishes I'd make mine before I've found words to tell him that won't draw his blood.

The one saving grace is school, and the hopeful path it makes away from here--however confused that path may be, as I always meant to go to college to be educated, and here suddenly I find I must choose a Career. This proves difficult; as much as I love my books I find I don't care to teach them, and yet other occupations appeal even less.

It's a muddied hope--but right now it's the brightest thing I own.

What relief, then, to find a simple place where at last I can let all this tension spill.

Hello.

Why am I Helaina?  For Heloise, as I fear I'm the sort of wretched creature who most always has an Abelard; Heloise, but younger, more modern and more--I confess it--vain. 

More on Abelard later.