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.