I am so exhausted. I had work and then a senior project presentation. I also twisted my ankle and it hurts like hell. I am just going to sleep right now.

Insomnia, be damned!

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Turquoise

Today was the empty bowl dinner and it was a blast. So many people showed up and I bought some awesome bowls! I cut bread for hours and I think I might have sprained my thumb, but that is fine. My life is becoming physically exhausting though. School, work, volunteer work, it’s all becoming too much, I think.

I live so much inside my head these days, amidst a sweaty panic attack, and full-blown mental claustrophobia. Freedom is a lie, and professors are all whores to the imagined future. Freedom is a lie, and we’re all whores to the imagined Future. I need sleep and rest and calm. I remember when life was so simple and I didn’t care about anything. Those were dark times, but at least I could rest and breathe. Now, the darkness calls to me, tempting me back to the inky blackness. It seems like ages since the last time I fell, so long ago that I cannot even remember it. The attraction grows stronger with each passing second and the shade over existence grows darker. I feel myself losing my grip. Reality is becoming distorted with each passing moment replaced by the next and nothing lasts longer than an instant. So here I lie, preparing to take the plunge.

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Home soon. What a day. I’m being pulled in every direction by my arms and legs. These days are getting stranger and stranger. Or maybe I’m the one becoming stranger. Whatever. Either way, this is bizarre. I have no idea what to write about, I feel so brain dead. At this point I just want a nap. I think there might be an air-borne virus going around causing to everyone act all different today. Or maybe there’s a full moon tonight. I just want to sleep. I might go pierce. Sleep’s more appealing at this point. I want to sleep. I want to curl up and dream the dreams of the happy and restless. I don’t know what’s going on anymore. I am so tired. The break is mere days away but seems like an eternity stands in between home and I.

Usually, I don’t sleep. I like it. I like staying up and talking. I don’t need sleep all that much, although I like to dream. I wish night was longer, and I could stay up forever. I feel closer to the universe every minute that passes. I want to put down the feeling on paper, but sadly I can’t. I want to draw. Draw me, the earth, comets, snowflakes, telephone posts, anything. It seems like I’ve been thinking for one hundred years and think is all I’ve been able to do, but I can’t thing straight. Does that mean I’m thinking crookedly? Isn’t that kind of a bad thing?

Tonight is different though. Drunken. Exhausted. Can’t write. Energy drained from the screaming running dancing cheering. I barely remembered what I had to do. Day four and already I’m forgetting what I promised myself, but I remembered just in time, right before sleep swallowed my brain. I want to sleep. For once sleep seems too far away. I am snuggly in my sheets but the cruel wind I can’t help but imagine is here, is keeping me awake. My head feels heavy and my eyelids are weighing down. I’m borrowing minutes of wakefulness, while I have long outstayed my welcome in the conscious world.

My time at the hospital was interesting. They stuck 6 electrodes to my face, 2 behind my ears, 4 in my hair, 2 to my shoulders, and 2 to my legs. They also put tubes in my nose and mouth and two electrode belts around my waist. Then I had to sleep with all of that crap connected to machines. It was not fun at all.

Then, today I had to get up and have other tests done. I gave 4 vials of blood, had an unltra sound, got a shot in the same vein that I gave blood from, and got x-rays. It was a very long day. On the up side, I went on a shopping spree with my mom to make me feel better.

I am exhausted now, so I am actually going to sleep at a reasonable time!

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I am so not going to have a fun night. I will be in the hospital from tonight until tomorrow afternoon. It is going to be so boring! Everything is so white and clean. Hospitals are a universe condensed into white walls, endless tile, waiting rooms, and uniform carpet.

The people living there are aliens in multi-colored smocks, running around speaking only in acronyms, wielding strange machines with blinking lights and foreign whistles. So strange and foreboding they seem, most of us start or end our lives in these places. They can be houses of great joy and love, or they can be places of immense sorrow and despair. As children the majority of us fear this great looming place, as we learn early on it’s a place we go when we hurt. Though as we grow older many of us cling to that association, and avoid this place as much as possible.

Hidden in the cracks of this white fortress of the wounded, is happiness. It may be small and hard to find, but it is there, among the frequent visitors chatting with their attendants. It’s among the grand-children coming to visit with balloons in tow. It’s among the new mothers, shining beautifully at this being they’ve created.

Pain is also here, whether it be the deep emotional pain of the loss of a loved one, or the momentary pain of a needle point piercing the skin. Such sadness can grow here, in the shadows of doubt and the loss of hope, and as humans we always seem to take more notice to the darkness rather than the light. We define our lives with the pain we feel, and since the hospital is so frequently the host of it, we often leave it changed in some way or another.

Sometimes, we may find the sorrow and the ache to be too great. We imagine it might just swallow us up in a dark tidal wave, leading us down to drown in its depths. But what so few of us realize is that the darkness, the pain, the sorrow is not something bad. It is a natural balance of life. Dark and light, sadness and joy. Do not fight the tide as it threatens to swallow you, but embrace it courageously, feel it deep inside you but do not let it overcome you. It may steal from us a small piece of our being, but with that small part we connect with the billions of others that have felt the waves of sorrow and have lived on. For as all things, this too shall pass, and we will look back and appreciate our time in the light more deeply than ever before. Often we find that only when we’re sopping wet and frozen to the bone, we realize that we have taken our happiness, our warmth, for granted.

I take solace in the happiness here in this foreign land, the moments of laughter and light I receive from the wonderful people here. In this micro-universe, they are the ones who remain. They alone stand and bear the sorrow and the happiness, the pain and the healing, and they do all this and more, day in and day out. I will leave this place, and I will be a changed person. Hopefully a better person, and one who appreciates the value of a ray of sunshine.

Do not fear this place. It is a place of great transition, a place of life as well as death, and we should never fear the yin and the yang of the world. One does not exist without the other, and people do not exist without happiness and sorrow, without pain and pleasure, without darkness and light. And when you stand where I stand on the shores of the blue oblivion, remember, light is not far off if you just hold on.

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Turquoise

The constant clicking of the clock, why won’t it stop? It drones on and on without pause, mocking my insomnia. The steady beat seems to be a song for the silence, playing off the cracked walls to the water-stained ceiling.

The Beethoven of the dead roses.

Everything sits still, in place. Perfect at this time and moment until activity starts up and the apartment becomes a bustle of laughter and screams. The mirror in my bedroom sits quiet and comfortable as it sleeps. Tomorrow it will be flipped and broken, smashed to pieces as I throw a bottle at my reflection. My friends of insomnia, I greet them again as I sit here alone.

The dripping of the broken sink, Act 5. The stillness of the royal fruit bowl, a class act of art. Like the black spot on the white canvas… people actually pay for this shit.

My therapist says I should take more medication, relax more, exercise more, and work more. Tell your doctor you have insomnia and she’ll give you a schedule for a thirty-two hour day and a prescription for sleeping pills. The truth is that if I told my therapist about the clicking clock, the dripping sink, the royal fruit bowl, she’d have me committed.

Today, or yesterday I suppose, I chose to tell my therapist about the first story I ever wrote. It was about a bad game of Russian roulette. She stared at me from across the table and asked me how I felt.

Fine, I told her… fucking marvelous.

Last week I told her about the enjoyment I get from late night supermodel shows. And she asked me if I had a history of schizophrenia. The first day I went in and she asked me if I feel disturbed. I said no, I just love throwing money at some big shot, expensive therapist. The truth is, I sit up every night, listening to my little dining room orchestra. Maybe tonight we’ll hear a piece by the squeaky window sill. A dramatic interpretation by the sofa lint. And I tell my therapist, no… I’m not squatting. No, I’m not crazy. And no, to the best of my knowledge, no one in my family ever played bass for Metallica. The questions are as constant as my midnight shows .The truth is that for every petal that falls from the wilted rose,

I’m thirty seconds older, not a moment wiser, and only minutes away from my death bed.

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Well, it is almost 2am and I am not tired at all, so I have decided to start a blog. Ordinarily this would not be a problem, but I have work at 8:30 in the freaking morning. I’ve decided to try to post at least once a day, because at this point I think it is the only way that I will stay sane.

I have so much on my plate this year; I am graduating early, so I have to do senior capstone as well as regular classes for my major. Capstone is kicking my butt, who in their right mind wants to do a yearlong project that will determine if you will graduate or not. I DON’T. On top of capstone, I am taking 2 higher level math courses, two computer science courses and a liberal studies course.

Well, I wish that I could say more now, but I am actually going to try to go to sleep, I will make a post with more information about me, later!

01000010 01111001 01100101 (Bye),

Turquoise