The night

So.

It's funny how nothing can really happen in your life that anyone outside your head can see, but you can just wake up one day and think, boy, I am really fucked. Or, boy things have got to change. Or, boy, if I keep having these goddamned dreams, I'm going to kill someone else or myself.

This was that day. I'm up late now, because sometimes if I only sleep a little, I don't get The Dreams. They seem to come much more strongly when I get a lot of sleep. I made the mistake of going to bed at a reasonable hour last night (mostly because I felt like hell), and had a dream that fucked with my head so much that I had to make myself bleed just to stop thinking about it. Driving to work was hell. Nothing to do but sit there in the car and think about it. It made me feel filthy. It made me feel, like, it made me feel like I am a terrible person. And all I wanted was to get away from it. From the truth it was shoving at me.

Echgrble, what a fucking idiot I can really be.

I was a microcosm of emotional ills and extremes the whole day. It was hard to play the corporate game, where you smile and talk to people in the elevator and discuss projects and joke about politics and skipping lunch and staying late and all that crap. All I wanted to do at lunch was walk down to the river and pace and look at it and throw stuff into it and maybe do some sort of screaming or crying activity. Which of course is a futile want, because I can't remember the last time I was actually able to cry real tears that had anything to do with me. And it didn't matter anyway, because there was so much work on my desk that the only lunchbreak I had was the approximately 7 minutes and 28 seconds it took to walk down to the corner cafe and get some pasta salad. I ran up the stairs on the way back and had a minor asthma attack. That helped. It got my mind off things, anyway.

Now it's almost 2 in the morning again. I am still awake. I am still here. What in the hell is going to happen tonight when I go to sleep?

What if I wind up a dry, dessicated shell? What if I forget everything and cut this off, cut off what I am, with these dizzying swirls of emotion and color? What if I plunge back into experience? What if I turn up the saturation? What if the color bleeds out of me?

One delicious thing about all this is that it doesn't matter to anyone else nearly as much as it matters to me. I get to keep this private hell right between my eyes and behind my sternum and buried in my gut. I carry it with me and it's nobody else's. You can read about it, you can know me and see it in my eyes, but you're not living with it. And I'm glad. Because really, it's ridiculous.