Back to Darkness

Life becomes a nightmare at times.  Like three-thirty in the morning.  This morning.  Strange and terrible dreams woke me.  I got up, drank water, and went back to bed.  Not to sleep.  Only to waking nightmares, the thinking ones.  In the lightless night, my life sunk in on me until it was no life at all, or only a semblance of one.  And they were all true, all those dark and hideous notions, all true, all mundane, all things that I must do that have not been done.  I think that was the crux of it, the massive buildup of things I have let go too long.  Bills, landscaping, house maintenance.  And of course, lying there in the absolute quiet, I wanted the company of my own true love, the physical reassurance that comes from a touch in the night.

And from that point on, I was thinking/dreaming about my shrunken life.  How had it become so reduced?  Through injury, weight gain, a slowing of the reflexes, a loss of the social graces?

And this, I realize, this typing alone in the darkness, is just another form of the nightmare, an extension from sleeping to dreaming nightmares to thinking in bed to this.

The further I go along life's path to understanding the human condition, the more disappointed I become.  Of course, I have done everything wrong.  I have had every wrong desire.  It was a mistake not to indulge them.  It is a mistake to indulge them.  Either way you go wrong, no matter if you are a hunger artist, a ravenous beast, or something in between.  Perhaps it is that in-betweeness that is worst.  But that is only a romantic notion, I am sure.  And as I decided long ago when I was still deciding things, the beauty of being human is that you can always change your mind.  I may change mine.  About everything.

I'm sure that will work out.