Sat, Jan 19, 2002 11:38PM -0600

Oh, but to say too much, or to say too little. It scarcely matters. All I hope for is that writing this down will serve its purpose--to quiet my quailing heart, to hold this in abeyance so that I need not think of it any further. There is work to be done, whatever I'm feeling.

Have you ever woken up with the realization that you are not where you thought you should be? Not a panicked revelation. (The wrong bed, the wrong apartment, the wrong person sleeping next to you.) No, nothing as acute and distressing as that. Just the realization that at one point in time you just may have made a wrong turn somewhere. At this point, there's no way to pinpoint where that mistake was made, no way to unravel the weave of Fate to try and fix it, no chance to get off this train careening off to God-knows-where. But the feeling just won't go away. It's all fucked up. End of story. It's time to get on with life. Right.

Is it just me? Am I the only one who gets lost in what-might-have-beens? Even if my plans and schemes were all built on pure vapor, stacked upon a rickety framework of if-only-this and if-only-that?

But I'm tired of rationalizing things. This is not what I wanted. True, I don't know what I do want, except in bits and pieces, in fragments of dreams and fantasies. But I have no idea how to get there, or, even had I avoided those ill-advised turns and exits, how I could've gotten there. Maybe it's all just my own private insanity anyway. Maybe there was no way to get there, and this really is how it's supposed to be.

Still, to let a dream die, and to let nothing take its place, to let that part of my soul lie fallow, is a daunting thing. In the least, I have gathered enough wisdom to realize that to fill the void simply for the sake of filling it would be sheer folly. And still, it is not enough. To fill it, or to let it lie empty. I do not know which way is best. I only know what is there, or more precisely, what is not there, and I am not comfortable with it. The best I can do is pretend it's not there, I suppose. But it isn't enough. Maybe nothing ever will be, and that's the reason I've ended up where I've ended up. And yet it's so true that if you can feel despair, that means you're still hoping. How infuriating. It's not until you feel absolutely nothing that all hope is lost.