Love and squalor
I know I'm in bad shape when I have nothing left to say. I was toying with the idea of some strictly descriptive writing - devoid of any message or moral or story or plot or content. It's because I have nothing to say. I could describe what my world looks like, just to see if I could write well enough. Or half-well-enough. I can't, though. The sad thing about a journal is that you need to live before you write. I'm afraid of being presumptuous right now. I don't want to make things real by writing about them.
Nothing happens. Nothing has happened.
That isn't true. Things have happened. There have been small and slight encounters with my parents that I tore to shreds with my therapist. I kept searching for some meaning. Every gesture was ripped apart, the stuffing knocked out, just to see what was there. There was only sawdust though; nothing important. I took these half remembered incidents and wrung them for all they were worth, and I had nothing. No insight, no stories, no growth. I want something to happen so badly that I took the smallest things and tried to find something worthwhile in them.
My parents have been absent lately. My mother's taken by migraines; my father by work. When they are around, they hunker around the television and banter about baseball. My therapist said that sometimes families eat around the television to avoid painful conversation - or any conversation at all. I'd believe the painful conversation part, but the house is full of riotous laughter when they bask in the glow of Sport Center. She asked me if I felt left out, and I said "Hardly!"
I eat dinner by myself. I'm not lonely. I'm just afraid that they feel insulted because I don't partake in the nightly sports analysis rituals. I can understand that they would feel rejected or dejected. After all the blows and confrontations and reconcilliation, things aren't much different. I like eating by myself. I like my own company. (and, invariably, the company of the internet)
Sometimes I'm just worried that there are undercurrents and unspoken feelings that I've missed. And here I am. Thinking and trying to dredge some meaning out of small gestures, tiny things people have said, emotional table scraps. I wonder if it's worth it. I wonder if there's something there after all. It's so hard to tell sometimes.
I don't have much to say.
Thursday night was beautiful. I swept up my cat and brought him to my bed. The light in my closet was on, so the room was eerily lit. It's so strange to describe the way a cat sleeps. He wasn't actually sleeping, just resting with me. I remember how he smelled - slightly of salt. He breathed on me, and it was warm and comforting. Every now and then, he would stretch out his front feet and brush my face. I almost wanted to cry. I dozed for a while, and decided to try some of my homework.
I kept drifting in and out of sleep - a cat is a sedative. And all of a sudden, the light fell out of my lamp. It just shut off, by itself. I remember thinking "I can take a hint," and so I slid my textbooks off my bed. And I woke easily. One of the reasons that I was so depressed over Christmas break might have been the lack of daylight. I expected the solstice to bring light back every morning, and when I didn't see that I broke down.
I had built up expectations. I had thought that Christmas would make thngs easier, that Christmas would take away all the worries I had been dragging around. Dealing with the worries and the anxiety wasn't that bad - I had trudged through a few months in a zombie-like state. And I had made it, I had made it. It was only when I expected the dusty emotions and pain I couldn't speak to go away and it didn't. That was what crushed me.
Now, though, I wake easily. It's light when I wake up, and light when I get home. Over Christmas break, I had expected the light to come rushing back to me. It didn't. Silly me, thinking the solar system revolved around my emotional state. Now it's back, it's light again, and it hasn't made that many changes in the way I feel. Not as many as prozac, at any rate. The difference is, I didn't expect it to make any changes.
Thursday night was beautiful though. I didn't do any of the work I had to do, but I felt so nice. It doesn't matter to me, it doesn't matter.
When things happen, I'll write more. It's hard to write when you're in stasis. Also, diaryland seems not to show my last entry in my archives. It's still here though.
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2000-03-04, I liked it way up there.
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