Ponderance

I was lying in bed just now when a wave of loneliness swept over me and provoked a somewhat curious thought. Since the whole divorce thing, I have been busy. I have been doing things, travelling, working out, pirating endless streams of data, reading, working, going out with Vixen, whatever, but in the end, one thing is for sure. I do not allow myself a lot of time to meditate on things. I am a doer.

Part of this stems from the fact that I know that when I have downtime, that is when I get most depressed. I don't like being retrospective or introspective particularly. When I am doing things, I am not thinking about what I am not doing. The exception to this has been the past month or so when I could not help to think that I was pretty much a failure up to this point in my life. This caused me not to sleep.

I think it is moderately funny that I am going to Japan. One of the places that I have dreamed about visiting since I can remember, and I am going to live there. That is crazy. The other thing that makes me kind of crack up is the fact that Japan is known to be one of the most lonely places for a Westerner to go to and I will be living there. Of all the emotions that one can muster in their lives, loneliness is the one that I am most scared of and that I most dread. Yet, there is part of me that has an overwhelming drive to be alone. I think parts of my mind are secretly plotting to make me think about everything I have done up to this point and come to terms with it. I haven't done this with some stuff as thoroughly as I should have and I think that I am pushing myself to do it.

Oh yeah, the whole insomnia thing...do you wanna know what started it? It all started because of a dream. The dream was encouraged by a question that a girl I work with asked me about my relationship with Mushi. She asked me, "You have to have had some good times with Mushi or else you wouldn't have stayed together as long as you did. Do you remember some of those good times?" When she asked me that, I had to think. I could remember great experiences that Mushi and I shared when we were first going out but after that, they petered off substantially. That made me really sad.

That night I went to sleep and for the first time in quite a few months I had a dream about Mushi. We were in a house, though not ours, and we were making dinner. We were in the kitchen together and we were cooking together. While we cooked, we talked and played and it was in this dream that I remembered all of the things that made me fall in love with Mushi to begin with and made me so fond of her. She was being playful and giggling and I was so happy to see her in this mood. This went on for a while and then I woke up.

I was alone in a big bed in the basement apartment of an older house that I share with Demonator. I felt so let down and alone right then that I kind of felt like I didn't ever want to sleep again and risk having another dream like that. The following night I only slept for a few hours and the same was true for the next night. By the third night, I wasn't sleeping at all. Then for a few days, I could only sleep thanks to sleeping pills. All because of a really really good dream that made me hate reality for a while. But the funny thing about that dream is that it enabled me to think about the positive aspects of Mushi and not just the negative ones. I feel more comfortable thinking about Mushi now because I am remembering her in a positive light. The negative stuff is still there and we had a ton of it in our relationship....thus the failure of it. But I remember good stuff now too and that makes me a tad more at ease with the whole thing for some reason. I don't like being mad a Mushi and I think that I was eating myself up by demonizing her in my mind as a way to make me feel better about the whole thing. I locked a lot of stuff away for some reason and all of that memory is coming back out again. All because of that one really good question.

It is odd how many steps one must take to fully come to grips with things that happen in their lives. To remember my feelings from seven or eight months ago and to recall the anger I had and then to flashforward to now, it is almost a Zen thing. I am much more at peace. The quitting Costco and going to Japan thing helps with this too but I am much more calm now. Anger still creeps in here and there as does loneliness and anxiety. But not as much as before and at least now when I don't sleep it is because of positive forces playing through my life. Its all so weird, maybe because I think I am a largely negative person. I am trying not to be anymore.

I had another shorter dream about Mushi a night or two ago. When I woke up, I wasn't dissappointed or sad, I just was.