I’ve had terrible success trying to shake my recent habit of late evening naps. I think tonight might have provided the leverage to overcome some of my weakness. It is one thing to wake up from a night’s sleep feeling all tricked out of your mind and paranoid from a bloated dream that touches on all the wrong nerves, because you have an entire day to shake out of it. The sun is there, which brings out the rest of life and you know that you’re living in a breathing world. When it happens at 10 pm, for all you know you’re still dreaming. There is very little sound outside beyond distant, anonymous barking, the ambient hums of mechanical monsters haunting the paved pathways, marking their territory with exhaust fumes and leaking fluids, and sometimes, like tonight, the wind and the trees whispering messages to each other.
I woke up feeling empty, nature is giving me nothing but support for that feeling. Everyone else is sleeping the night away, or winding down what was likely another typical, long day. My brain will be wired by the time the clock meets midnight. I’m realizing that it wasn’t just an off putting dream that has me feeling this way, though. I am starting to feel that I spent the past week in the company of ghosts. Consider this: lifelong friend comes into town and stay with me for a few days. This is the first time I have seen him in 3 years. This is also the first time he has been in the state in 10 years. Just like that, he is gone, and it could be anywhere from a couple months to a couple years between the next sighting. Next, we have my right hand man for the past 6 or so years of my life. I see him less infrequently, but that also means it is much more sporadic and random. Pepper in a stretch of days that were just like old times, then cap it off with being suddenly stirred out of sleep for 30 seconds to pick up a knife and say, “turns out my flight was today, see ya,” with the fact that it will be over a year before the next time I see this man in person and you will be certain it was all an apparition. Finally, one of the last pieces to this puzzle, and when combined, the longest standing and most consistent from childhood through adulthood. I just saw him get married, that is what brought all of the specters together. He is going to enrich the Earth across the globe for another year also– this is what this guy does. Before I even get to know him again, he is gone, and next time I see him, he will be even more foreign than the previous times. All of them will be. I will be, too– whether it is because I am the same person, or because I grew in awkward places, we’ll see.
Now depleted I stand, empty I feel. I am pretty sure I had the epiphany that I had a large portion of my soul sucked out over the period of 6 days, that’s the fourth person I have to mark off this year, and another one that I never got to meet. Naturally, I am expecting the physical universe to literally start rocking and crumbling before my eyes. The only option I’ll have left at this point is to listen to fitting music and learn how to gracefully fly away.
You were looking for some sort of change, weren’t you James? You never said you weren’t looking for it to smack you in the face, Right now, I’d prefer to still be in that dream, trying to speak Spanish with a family who had purchased our house which was never for sale than to be sitting here feeling emptied out right now. I’m telling myself right now that this feeling is nothing more than a bull’s gift to the ground, but it’s ineffective.
I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will be, though. I don’t have a choice.