When you sleep next to someone, you are at your most vulnerable with them. You start out in one place, and wake up some odd number of hours later in a completely new position with no recollection of how you got there. All the movements, the way your bodies move in the dark, the breaths you take into your lungs, maybe even the dreams you envisioned, all things you can’t remember because you never really knew them. It takes an enormous amount of trust to sleep next to someone. Maybe that’s why he’s the only person I’ve let stay since that time I had my heart broken so long ago. It’s amazing how one person can break though the thick walls of your soul and shake up everything that’s settled there, like a snow globe, turning you into something spectacular. Maybe that’s how you know they’re the right one.
I am convinced I am mentally ill, yet I am convinced I’m just pathetic and fooling myself. I am sure that there’s nothing wrong with me. That is also my worst fear: that life may be too much for me to handle on my own, without the excuse of any sort of physical or mental handicap. I simply can’t get by day to day, for no other reason than that I am too weak to overcome my sensibilities. I blame myself.
My mind has closed down since my return home. Last week I was racing through novels, exploring a new city, and thinking in the sort of narrative way that makes you want to write; it makes you want to share your thoughts with the world for them to read and consider.
What is it about home that closes me off from myself? I’m far too busy to write, far too tired to read. Smoke a bowl and all the aches and pains of the day disappear. And all thoughts are locked away beyond the reach of a carefully balanced mind, in danger of tilting off center at any moment.
Today was unbearably hot. I woke up with an all too familiar tightness in my chest. Work dragged by in a blurry haze. After work I dared venture out to the park for all of 45 minutes before the weight of the outside world became too heavy for my shoulders, and I returned home to the safety of bed.
Carol Cassella writes in Oxygen, “I wonder if it is more painful to be so acutely alert to the progressive failures of your body, whether it would be easier to lose cognition before corporeal function.” While she speaks of the delicate process of aging, I cannot help but relate to this statement in an entirely different manner.
I wish I was not alert. I wish I was unaware of the heaviness of my thoughts. I wish I, like many of the fairer sex, lived in blissful ignorance of my own sensibility. Being aware of the effects of my own mood raises within me a desperate need to control them, to keep things in balance, and to keep up my facade.
I wish for one day, just one, to be easy. I’m exhausted.
At first, I was disappointed with our Skype conversation. He was tired from a long day at work; my feet ached from miles of sight-seeing, and longed for a cold shower and a warm bed. I wished he’d had more excitement for the things I’d seen, more of an enthusiasm for my endeavors. Instead, he could only muster the energy to repeat that home was lonely without me next to him each night and each morning, how he anxiously awaited my return to him.
I felt cheated. I wanted more passion and curiosity regarding my travels. I wanted to feel a genuine interest (and maybe even a bit of envy) over the things I’ve seen here. Our conversation left me craving something deeper.
This entire trip has left me craving something deeper. I’ve been harboring a secret anger at myself for feeling this way: longing for the days to slip by in a blur until my return home to him finally arrives. How could I want nothing more than to leave here, the beautiful city of Prague, for him? What kind of life do I live where I would rather spend each and every predictable day waking up and falling asleep next to a familiar lover and friend, rather than in some new exotic city?
And as I lay there, alone in the darkness of a shitty Czechoslovakian dormitory, I thought maybe that life would be a different kind of wonderful.
My mind is as tangled as bedsheets on a hot, lonely summer night when my buzzing thoughts keep my brain awake long after my eyes have closed.