It seems lately I go through my days aching for sleep and then I get in bed and have zero desire or inclination to sleep at all. I seem just so wrapped up in anxiety and worry, and it seems somehow that I am half happy and half miserable most of the time. I wish I could take a tour of the minds and feelings of other people. I've lived so many years in various simultaneous moods. Heavy, dark, brooding - then light, peaceful, flexible, playful.
Sometimes I am so sure that I've always been myself, that I have a very solid sense of self - then, at times, it's hard to know what a self is at all. Things seem so so so defined at times, and then the lines all blur and all the paint runs together and there is nothing solid at all in this world. Sometimes my skin seems so real and so mine - then sometimes I look down at my arm and imagine it could just as easily belong to another person entirely. Sometimes, when I've been overdosing on meditation, this body of mine seems like clothing I've outgrown, and this whole world seems so far from where I am.
I have a friend who almost died once in the hospital. She says she encountered God that day. She says she knows she is supposed to live because he sent her back, but she yearns to return to Him.
I cannot say I've experienced similar, but there have been days this year where life has seemed like such a distant and unreal thing - where it seemed like light and connectedness was the real reality, the overwhelming reality.
My beautiful gf will be done soon with her summer class, and we are planning to spend our time indulging in whatever enjoyments we can squeeze in before it's time for her to return to school. I am going to be meeting her parents soon.
She really is the most awesome person. She's just beautiful through and through. Her computer-programmer mind and her bee-stung lips and her knack for understanding inexplicable people and her melancholy eyes, her long legs, her freckles, the peace she carries with her, her military bearing, her sweet oval face and her proud forehead, her tomboy grace, her swan neck, her quiet and funny observations, her strange and charming drawl, her ethics. Well, and then there's a light shining from her somehow. She seems just made of moonlight and fire. I never could have imagined her before I met her, and when I met her, I was not looking for a new relationship, but she poured all that light and fire into me and it was such a balm to my troubled, troubled soul.
Last September, a friend told me what her father had told her about relationships. He said, "You know it's the right relationship when the two of you are better together than either of you are apart - when the sum adds up to more than the two of you alone." Having just come out of the opposite type of relationship - where no matter how much love there was between us, the relationship made us both less than we were individually - this little piece of advice was so timely. Hearing it gave me the chance to say to myself, "I want that."
And that's what I want still.