As of late my breathing has been nothing more than trial and error. Jumping out of the bed at three in the morning, crying.
3:30 a.m. heavy breathing.
4:00 a.m. tears
4:30 a.m. heavy breathing.
4:49 a.m. bathroom.
5:00 a.m. tears
5:30 a.m. you get the general idea.
I’ve been mistaking strangers for friends and lovers for friends. The little amount of sleep I get takes place on the left side of my bed. I use to have trouble getting to sleep at night. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I would start in on stage one pre-hyperventilating type of breathing. The tears would sometimes follow, but after a short time, I could usually get to sleep. The nightmares were there, but for the most part, they were bearable.
I stopped having dreams when I was the age of six or seven. I didn’t believe in Santa Clause anymore, but I would have dreams around the end of December of him, shimmying his way down our chimney. They were nice and they were some of the last dreams I had, before the nightmares started.
A cousin on my fathers’ side of the family had just died and we had gone to his funeral that day. After that, I can’t really remember what might have made them start.
The phone rings. It’s my boss wondering where I am. “Sorry, I guess I overslept,” I tell him. I finish off a beer, grab my keys and I’m out the door.
I’m twenty-three now and I can’t tell you where the years have gone. I still feel eighteen in my heart, but not in my soul. I’ve been hurt really bad twice and you tend to grow up when woman leave. When family members leave. Friends.
I may be naive beyond words, but I believe I still have a soul. I haven’t lost it yet or given up on it. There are plenty of scratches on it. And dents. It gets rained on a lot and my mother never taught me how to do laundry.
Perhaps it’s the writer in me that wants to believe there is still good in people. Or maybe it’s the poet, we’re all poets or at least we think we are. I can’t really think of a single person that has never let me down, as sad as that is. Maybe that’s because I write and I have this childish belief that somehow I can understand everything before I really know anything about it. I hadn’t thought much in this way until a discussion with a dear friend of mine. As she put it, “we're writers. We daydream too much and it gets us into trouble. We create characters in our stories...and we create characters in our lives.” I think this covers situations, in addition to people. If I was as smart as I think I am, perhaps I wouldn’t be as lost. Perhaps I could still have dreams at night about little kids running through a front yard, carrying a red plastic chair.
I’m going to get in a wreck on of these days while I’m driving, due to my thinking. At times, I wish I could just work my forty hour work week, come home, drink a beer, watch TV, go to sleep, and not have this habit of thinking all of the time. So much that it’s distracting. Is your own impending demise easier to come to terms with when you don’t spend every waking moment thinking about it? And wondering how many people will show up to your funeral or if there really is a heaven?
I’ll have trouble getting to sleep tonight. And tomorrow night. And probably four weeks from now and three months from now.
And yet, the sun will still set at it’s regularly changing time tomorrow, the grass will grow and somebody will masturbate in a bookstore restroom.
I’m just here along for the ride, trying not to get hurt. Trying to continue breathing.
All my systems are coming up with errors.
