I’ve been drugging myself to get to sleep the past few days. It’s the only thing that works, though it feels sort of sinister, like I’m holding myself hostage and going under is when I can perpetrate nefarious deeds upon myself. Sleep is escape and oblivion, cliche but true, it feels good, it feels like nothing which is good. So why does it also feel laced with guilt, like I’m cheating? This whole mess sometimes has an air of the universe grabbing me by the shoulders and turning me in the opposite direction I was facing, sun now all in my eyes, the blinding truth, and whispering forcefully into my ear, “Feel THIS.” And every time I sleep for no other reason than to avoid, I am shielding my eyes and covering my ears all at once and refusing to feel it. I think I resent the childish way I handled everything, the hollow, barbed comments I shot, the accusations I slung that I didn’t believe in, the petulant, vindictive impulse to make him feel as bad as I do and to prolong it. The part of me that is smart and objective wants to learn from this. That part of me is sounding fainter and fainter daily, either I’ve stifled her completely or she has just given up. Which means I have given up.
Fall is here. It was hot out today, but autumn has definitely arrived. It’s getting colder in the Midwest, and whenever something happens out west I assume it will eventually make its way to me, everything moving always to the right like lines in a book. I depend on that inevitability perhaps too much. Leaves are falling, the sun is falling, the temperature is falling, everything is falling. Fall. As I write this the sun has dropped almost completely. No more blinding light. If you ignore something for long enough it will get fainter and fainter and duller until it’s gone.
There’s a regular at 61C who plays a Yamaha keyboard outside and comes in for a coffee hourly. He tips a dollar for each cup of coffee so the baristas here listen to his insane ramblings with a mixture of deference, pity, and detached interest. He has thick lips and a bushy black moustache. I wonder where he lives. “I’m trying to re-discover what I knew how to do at age five,” he says emphatically, with the sort of tone that AA participants use to talk about the time they were on the verge of going over the edge and were pulled back by the merciful hand of God. How they almost lost everything. Hit rock bottom, saw the light, finally came up for air gasping and sputtering, gave themselves up to that higher power. When they decide to finally annihilate and then discard the shrapnel of their broken will. “It’s never too late,” says the barista noncommittally, assuming he’s talking about his keyboard. I can see it from where I’m sitting, straddling two cafe tables like a saw horse.
It’s dark now. Sky the same color and texture as my navy suede heels that are starting to blister my skin. I’ve been wearing them all day because I think I look good in them and they make me feel pretty, but now they just hurt. Everything’s a metaphor now. And now that it’s nighttime I can’t shake the feeling that I wasted the sunlight while I had it. Am still wasting it even in that knowledge. Like I’m steeping in this regret and resentment until there is no more to soak up, until I’m indistinguishable from those poisonous feelings when I should be trying to learn, and in learning move on. Just, go forth. I still can’t. One day I will not feel this way, and maybe not even remember what this feels like, but what I hate more than anything is that I can’t see that point anywhere on the horizon. It exists somewhere, maybe, in that nebulous pitch of the night. If I had been paying attention when it mattered, it might have been discernible. For now it feels like some myth, a dream. Dreams are for dreamers. Oblivion is for me.
