Lunacy

Thu, Mar 07, 2002 11:05PM -0600

I suppose I could feel sorry for myself, but that would just be boring. I think that over the past few years, I've managed to perfect self-pity, thank you very much. There are other ways I ought to spend my time.

I refuse to feel a thing.

So I'm thinking about the future, in terms of days, years, decades, and it's all so bewildering and stupefying. A million decisions to be made, a million million million branch points hither and thither. It's hard to discern which ones have significance, and which ones don't matter at all, and amidst the noise, the clamor of all these imagined futures, I find myself growing weary. If surrender were an option, I might take it.

Is there truly no rest for the wicked?

So if things go well, I could very well have three weeks free in June, and pathetically, I can't figure out what to do with them. The best I've managed to figure out is that I am going to go to the beach and lie there everyday if I can manage it. San Diego, perhaps, if my sister will allow me to crash at her place. Worse comes to worse, I suppose I'll be making a commute from Eagle Rock to the ocean.

But I don't know. I know that everything I dream of is just running away. Running away from what, I think I may have forgotten, or am at least afraid to give shape to it by naming it, describing its outline. I have gazed at infinity, at the stately order of the universe, I have tried ot shape my life around this order, tried to somehow make myself be a part of the eternal dance and weave of Life in the sad, crude ways I know how, and I have been rebuffed, damned to spend the rest of my life half broken, my soul leaking out slowly. I like to think that we are all the same, damaged in some manner by the heedless vicissitudes of the world, but maybe it's not true at all. Perhaps I'm the only one who has managed to screw things up this badly. In the end, I will face all of this alone, there will be no words left, and it won't matter because there won't be anyone to listen anyway.

So I dream of the sunlight and of the sandy shore and the endless waves, because I cannot think of anything else, cannot seem to extend myself outside of my own circumscribed boundaries, cannot seem to grow like I feel I should. There are greater things than I can imagine at this juncture. I do not know how to reach out. I do not remember how to open my eyes and truly see.

As if the rest of my days were confined to damnable reiteration, tossing and turning in my sleep, dreaming of the same quiet misery day in and day out. Yes, I know. There is more to life than this. This hopeless sequence of mistakes and regrets and words not said when they might have mattered. To grow out of this, the step outside the circle. To dream. Oh.

I cannot seem to find what I need, do not know how to name it, and I'm just barely hanging on to this faint glimmer of hope, that somehow it will all turn out right when I wake up, that somehow I'll finally make the right decisions, that I will become what I need to be.

Oh, what is it that I'm hoping for?