Broken Nocturne
In the wee hours of the morning, always a reckoning. The weight of my existence comes down over me like a heavy veil of suffocating shadows. A life wasted, day after day. Or is it? Just trying to do better. Hiding? Trying to make every day count. But I didn't leave the house today. Trying to do better. God, did I live this day as if it were my last? Urgency. Need to do better, do more, be more. Why? Time is short. I don't know what this life would amount to on paper, on a headstone or eulogized. A waste? A near miss? An almost made it? Underachieving and side lined, sick, years upon years of sick. Wasted years of nothing. Trying to get up off the ground with a boot on the back of my neck. The same story. The same day over and over again. A synthetic existence where only the location changes slightly and shifts like a shadow on the wall. It's the same bed, the same dream, the same nightmare. What am I doing with this life? I feel stuck in quicksand. Everything moves so slowly, and my limbs are heavy.
Every dawn comes and I sleep. Every night comes and I'm wide awake moving in an opposite rhythm from the rest of the world. I live at night. It's my default setting, though I try so hard to fight it. It's like my body has a built in mechanism to sequester me from the rest of the world. Asleep while others bustle, awake while others rest. Reality is different here on the other side of the moon. Late at night everything takes on extra weight. Tragedies are more tragic. Sad films are devastating. Serious books become more somber. Regrets more bitter. Losses more grievous. Music has more pathos. My memories, my past and present seem undeniably fraught. My future, so uncertain.
If only I knew how much time I have left, and how to make it count. How can I change things? Not waste my days? I do the dishes. I feed the cat. I clean her litter. I knit. I putter around online. I watch TV. Another day passes where I make no mark on the world, where I don't go downstairs and get my mail, where I don't see another living soul (where I prefer not to in some ways). My friends phone in. My friends email. It's a wonder I have friends at all considering my constitution. I'm a hermit. At least a part-time one. I went to my knitting group last night. It was fun and breezily social as usual. I received many compliments on my new hair style. Much laughter and talking. The air is so much sweeter, until I leave, and the shine dulls.
Then I went to the 24 hour Laundromat. There were televisions mounted into the walls every few feet above the dryers, all on different channels, some in Spanish. Some with the sound on, and some mute with closed captioning. Televisions too high up to reach, or change the channel, to lower or raise the volume, to mute, to un-mute. I was detached from it, yet observing the hell we've created. This is people's idea of ideal. A tower of Babel made of TV screens. All sound and fury signifying nothing. At least there was an ice cream machine. I ate an old fashioned sugar cone, the one with the vanilla ice cream, chocolate coating and nuts, and it reminded me of childhood, when the ice cream man came around the block, and I ran to the street with coins, or the dollar my Mother gave me. I remember the time I thought I snuck a dollar from my Mom's purse, only to find it was a Twenty when I handed it to the ice cream man. He tried to spare my ass by asking me if I was sure I wanted to use this bill, and was it really mine? but there's no saving a young masochist with a guilty conscience, so I went ahead and paid with the Twenty with the lump in my throat; now I'd have to confess, and I knew I'd deserve everything I got afterward.
::::
P.S. Don't watch "The House of Sand and Fog" after 4am if you're an insomniac empath. I cried my eyes out. Saddest movie I've seen in a long time. It's probably responsible for part of my mood above.
Every dawn comes and I sleep. Every night comes and I'm wide awake moving in an opposite rhythm from the rest of the world. I live at night. It's my default setting, though I try so hard to fight it. It's like my body has a built in mechanism to sequester me from the rest of the world. Asleep while others bustle, awake while others rest. Reality is different here on the other side of the moon. Late at night everything takes on extra weight. Tragedies are more tragic. Sad films are devastating. Serious books become more somber. Regrets more bitter. Losses more grievous. Music has more pathos. My memories, my past and present seem undeniably fraught. My future, so uncertain.
If only I knew how much time I have left, and how to make it count. How can I change things? Not waste my days? I do the dishes. I feed the cat. I clean her litter. I knit. I putter around online. I watch TV. Another day passes where I make no mark on the world, where I don't go downstairs and get my mail, where I don't see another living soul (where I prefer not to in some ways). My friends phone in. My friends email. It's a wonder I have friends at all considering my constitution. I'm a hermit. At least a part-time one. I went to my knitting group last night. It was fun and breezily social as usual. I received many compliments on my new hair style. Much laughter and talking. The air is so much sweeter, until I leave, and the shine dulls.
Then I went to the 24 hour Laundromat. There were televisions mounted into the walls every few feet above the dryers, all on different channels, some in Spanish. Some with the sound on, and some mute with closed captioning. Televisions too high up to reach, or change the channel, to lower or raise the volume, to mute, to un-mute. I was detached from it, yet observing the hell we've created. This is people's idea of ideal. A tower of Babel made of TV screens. All sound and fury signifying nothing. At least there was an ice cream machine. I ate an old fashioned sugar cone, the one with the vanilla ice cream, chocolate coating and nuts, and it reminded me of childhood, when the ice cream man came around the block, and I ran to the street with coins, or the dollar my Mother gave me. I remember the time I thought I snuck a dollar from my Mom's purse, only to find it was a Twenty when I handed it to the ice cream man. He tried to spare my ass by asking me if I was sure I wanted to use this bill, and was it really mine? but there's no saving a young masochist with a guilty conscience, so I went ahead and paid with the Twenty with the lump in my throat; now I'd have to confess, and I knew I'd deserve everything I got afterward.
::::
P.S. Don't watch "The House of Sand and Fog" after 4am if you're an insomniac empath. I cried my eyes out. Saddest movie I've seen in a long time. It's probably responsible for part of my mood above.
posted by scribe at 9/10/2005
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