things i've learned among thieves

I don’t watch my weight, and the scale falls and rises. I’m not conscious of anything I put in my body. My indecisiveness becomes numbers that exist under my skin like the sun exists on earth. I’m still thin and not dead.
I hurt my legs and I can’t go anywhere. I focus on distance. Deepak said something about destinations but those don’t exist until I go somewhere.
Splinters poke my sides when I choose the road less traveled. My body takes the shape of people I vowed never to become, and the only way I recognize my face is because I’ve seen it before in the gaunt figures of the rooms they let me color in when I was seventeen. They were convinced it was therapeutic and it was great way of avoiding what really brought me there, and my bathroom had no shower curtain or mirror, and my bedroom had no door.
Also on the road less traveled I’ve noticed a lot of people don’t like me, and you’re not allowed to wear shoes and you‘re supposed to tell everyone how hard it was to get to the end and how much better you are because of it. But it’s hard to feel proud, because my success never would have come if it weren’t for my destruction.
I’m not going to say I don’t feel better when I come clean, but California mud is WARM and hides my face. I look like I was here before Manifest Destiny and waded in river beds to catch fish and painted my cheeks with the red clay you find here when you get to a secluded enough place that white men eventually forgot about it, along with fool’s gold and the small turtles no older than twenty years tops. In the clay there is sometimes sand and kelp if you are far enough west, but that same clay creates foundations of homes that you will build, and the beach will be your chain and the waves will be your whips, so it’s best to turn back now before you start feeling guilty because you give your family your P.O. Box instead of your home address and you don’t really miss them at all.
Lately the world has become see-through, and I feel like I’ve been playing chess my whole life because I know all the moves everyone will make before they make them, and I would prefer a little vulnerability and spontaneity on the part of humanity in general. I can’t expect it, but I would like to think there is a whole other level to the people I meet, although lately it’s been seeming like that’s just something I’ve convinced myself to believe.
As guilty as I feel on an everyday basis, there are some things I’m not sorry for. Like my voice or my realizations, or my only true cause. I’m not sorry for the things I believe, only the things I do. Eventually the unbalance will weigh heavy enough on my heart that the scale tips, and I’ll be left with a very big choice to make.
I feel like a lot of people should love me by now, but then I realize I don’t love a lot of people.