Last night I was plagued by nightmares about being drugged with sodium pentothal, held down by sniper fire in a beautifully furnished Victorian home with George Bluth. Between the clinkety-clink of the cubes in her low-ball, Mrs. Bluth said, in a moment of clarity, “If you can’t live for yourself, you might as well live for others”. The words made more sense to me than almost anything I’ve heard in the last month. She gave me a clockwork wink and disappeared, leaving us alone against her hired red beams and smoke grenades.
When I stepped outside to head to work this morning, the winter chill startled me into a false sense of alertness, but it was quickly taken over by a general feeling of uneasiness. The dreams were unsettling to say the least (I haven’t slept so poorly in over a month), and the last thing that I wanted to do was start the day off with a walk on a winter morning before there was any light out. I kept waking up every two hours, and as good as it was to feel exhausted enough to fall sleep again, it felt terrible to not actually be able. It’s as if I haven’t slept at all, and tragically enough, I start work for the new year today. I was hoping to be well rested for the first day back, but that isn’t happening, so I’ll be fighting off a tremendous urge to sleep when I get home. I’ll try to burn through it, which shouldn’t be hard.
In any case, I use the words, “more sense to me than almost anything I’ve heard in the last month” because John is in town. This is the person who knows me better than anyone else I know, better even than myself. Within half an hour of arriving, he helped me realize that I do require acceptance in my relationships, a need that has stemmed from childhood, that the best road to achieving my goals is not always the easiest one, and so many other countless things that I couldn’t have seen for myself. This winter break has been the worst in years, but now, John is here. I haven’t seen him in over six months. Yesterday, I couldn’t stop smiling, after finding him in the peephole of my front door.
This is my vacation.
