Still Up

The world has gone to sleep and left me here sitting at this computer. I’m painfully lonely tonight (sur-fucking-prise) but I’m just working through it. Literally, all the work I’d do at my desk tomorrow, I’m sitting up and doing now. Just trying to stop thinking, really. Because all my questions don’t have answers. At least, not text book ones. And I’m afraid textbook is the only thing that’ll get me to go to sleep right now. Something concrete, backed with facts where it’s unquestionable to me in my limited frame of reference. Like: “We are here because…” or “The meaning of life is…” Because right now feels like running in a circle. All this stuff. Getting all worked up … for what?

Right. No answer to that either.

I sat and talked with a friend tonight who was in awe of his own growing love of his son. And I remember once feeling genuinely excited at the prospect of my own and that heightened my enthusiasm for my friends as they would discover the world through their kids eyes. I feel like I’m attempting to empathize that joy through wet, heated saran wrap nowadays. I know there is a feeling there; I just can’t get too close to it, because who knows what mental hurt I’m setting myself up for. And every step I try to take to get closer to it, the more I restrict myself. Listening to a Lauryn Hill song the other day made my separation from that world more apparant. “I’ve never been in love like this before…” she sang to her son Zion. And all I could think is… I’ve had “love” make me feel like I was soaring through the clouds with sheer ecstacy. And that same love make me want to take my own life from unbridaled pain it inflicted. I don’t know if I’d be ready to manage anything stronger than that — I’m barely surviving with this version.

I do feel it full on when I dream of her though. Because for days after, I’m not the same. Maybe I’m just torturing myself.

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