Email to Jack Leary

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

(Rather heavily encrypted)

To: Jack
From: Nathan
Subject: see? this is me giving this a try...

So you don't get to call me contrary. I could have gone back downstairs and tried to kill the punching bag again, but here I am. I'm hoping you got the decryption program from Moira - it's the same one she had to read the emails I used to send her while she was on Muir and I was running around demonstrating my profound disrespect for authority. If you didn't, I'm going to feel really silly about ranting into the ether. Although you did say it was as useful for me to write down what I was feeling as it was for you to read it, didn't you? I remain very skeptical.

Things have not been particularly good since you were here on Thursday. Nor have they been an unmitigated disaster, and hey, no one's been killed or otherwise maimed. Improvement, no? There I go with the rhetorical questions again. Really ironic, given that you're not actually sitting here, so I don't really need them as a delaying tactic. But there's two in as many paragraphs. I don't know what it says about me that I like the question marks. I suppose I should give that some thought.

I'm getting off-track. You know the email I told you I was sending Charles? I did. Talked to Manuel, too, on Friday. I wish I could say it ended well, but it didn't. At the very least there was a minimal amount of yelling, and no throttling. Then someone hacked into Angelo's journal yesterday to impersonate him and reveal something very personal that he specifically didn't want the school to know. I wound up picking him up off his bathroom floor. Amanda's still struggling. And tonight, Angie had something of a meltdown on the journals and suddenly I'm remembering that I haven't done a damned thing to help her since Asgard. And I promised, Jack.

I feel like shit. Like a particularly selfish piece of shit. I'm frustrated, and I'm so fucking tired, and I'm scared because I feel like I'm backsliding. And I'm not sleeping again. I suppose this is why I have the prescription for sleeping pills, but I'm kind of tired of wrestling with the damned drug phobia on top of everything else.

What do I do if it turns out I can't handle this? This is everyday stuff, or almost. The sort of stuff you have to expect will happen on a regular basis when you're at a school full of mutant kids. The fact that I'm almost right back where I was last Tuesday is not doing wonders for my confidence in my coping ability. If I can't, if I try and I can't... I already screwed up with Manuel, biting off more than I can chew. Attempts to grow as a person and accept boundaries and limits aside, I'm not eager to get that much more deeply in touch with my fuckup-self. I don't like him. No one else does, either.

And now I sound like a lunatic. Here I thought I might have been able to avoid that in a text-based format. I should stop. I'll see you tomorrow when you get here.

Nathan