This is M's fifth Christmas locked up in kid jail. She was telling me about speaking Creole and how I can find a husband in south Florida and how her Mom fills up trailers with stuff from Good Will and goes to Haiti every year but this year her Dad is locked up in Jamaica and there was supposed to be a money order for $800 somewhere in the house but no one can find it. She also mentioned that despite my constant encouragement she will not become a social worker. "I was looking at you earlier, when you were talking to that girl? And I was thinking 'Why the hell does she work here?"

Right around the time M. was watching me and thinking that, I was sitting with Negative Attention Seeking Shanae and coloring; or rather, I'm coloring, she's making a huge deal out of ignoring me, loudly announcing that I'm on drugs, and demanding that security separate us. I'm just waiting it out--she'll come around eventually and color out of boredom and the shiny allure of markers. Couple seconds later she was clutching a plastic bottle of lotion and telling me to "duck, because I'm about to do something" and I was sort of laughing, saying I'm not going to duck because she doesn't need to throw any lotion at anyone when WHAP she smashes the bottle down on the table and it shatters and there are globs of lotion and shards of thin plastic all over her, the table, and the floor. And so I calmly picked out the shards of plastic and made a joke about wasting all this good lotion while I'm ashy. "Why you picking up all the plastic, you think I'm going to cut myself?" says the girl with jagged scars all over her arms, who tried to kill herself just weeks ago, who has a life story so devoid of warmth that when she acts crazy I just want to congratulate her for not eating humans. "Well, you know me, always worried about cutting" I said affably. Because it's true. These girls will cut themselves with anything.

The key moments for me are that I actually felt affable--that exploded lotion and unheralded aggression can just pass right through me carrying whatever messed up message they were supposed to send and move right on by. That just as I was thinking "Man, I love this job" M is asking what exactly is wrong with me; and also, that I can have tiny moments when if you stay calm and soothing then suddenly everyone is calm and soothing and we're wiping up lotion and making jokes about my scaly elbows.

WINTER [is a bad time to] Fall in Love

I just realized I want to be in love. It would balance the hurt of this world, fill the space where wine once warmed me, smooth the jagged edge between receiving and deserving. Except now it's winter and everyone who has ever loved me is married or inaccessible in a way I don't understand. Somewhere in my brain space there exists a closet that generates wonderful men who have loved me and I haven't seen it in time and that closet will be empty someday, is my worry. They walk out and stand patiently and then walk on to women better suited for them. I'm not sure how much good will toward me exists in the Universe, but I tell myself it's massive. Any time theology slides into math or volume I get panicky. I'm fianlly paying attention but the closet door is closed and there are no sounds coming from inside. Chick magazine advice is just as vapid but now directed right at me. The list of words and songs and smells that make me ache with the power of all the love I'm shedding gets longer and more surprising every day until I worry I'll be permanently flushed and on the verge of tears. The only culture I've ever lived in appears to be all wrong (on this question, to me) and so I'm out in the cold, so to speak. I'll just keep riding the bus, downloading love songs, reading poetry, and drawing nonsense. The last part of my adolescence is blossoming in the cracked jar of my thirties, and what's to be done with that? On the upside my endless empathy can grow and grow as I finally get what the fuck is wrong with teenage girls, and also try to tattoo on my muscles how much it sucks to be outside in Chicago in the winter, alone.

Her cheap heart hurt.

This kid has dark hair, brown eyes, peach skin, and quite a mouth on him. He pops up as Little Boy/Hyper/Bright/Guarded in my personal intuitive taxonomy. Anyway, these are words, he's a kid. Here's what stood out, honestly: he didn't like me. We did not hit it off. Mostly in this world I hit it off with people. I remember coming at him with the wrong tack and Brian having to do some mending. This kid liked Brian a lot, with the particular texture of a hyper boy who is guarded but not in the way he thinks he is. When a kid like that likes you it feels great but is exhausting.

He got out of kid jail last week and was walking to school with his mom to re-enroll. A 20-year rolled up on them, flashed some gang signs, and shot him in the head. This was on the southernmost street of our neighborhood. After years of rumored gentrification, it's been speeding up real quick and the Latin gangs that once ruled Logan Square--along with the now extinct white Gaylords--have been pushed to the south and west edges. Which is where he was shot. In the head. He's 14, he's alive and in a coma.

At Unicorn camp I had a particular experience of a little boy--all that energy radiating everywhere, knocking over breakable things and literally soul-puncturing with pure love. Some people are in so much danger, you know? We're all connected but some of us are way out from under the blanket, out there cold and vulnerable. It's heartbreaking. This is my own fault, too, all this heartbreak, I actually tattooed a prayer for heartbreak on my back. I had no idea. I suspect that if I'm surprised now I'm gonna be hella shocked later, like if I have kids, like if I fall in love, like if I stay sober for as long as I need to--forever--and keep having the truth of this broken world shoved into my big dumb heart.

The girl that got locked into the room for six hours? She was on the news, too, she's missing. My brain gets it--I've been shown enough of the map to see where we are located on the X and Y of desirable attributes, Maslow-wise, I think I've got a picture of what my own compassion consists of, but feelings-wise, right now I just ache for us.