2004-09-04
Nothing Is How It Should Be

hearing: Jesus in New Orleans - Over the Rhine
reading: nothing
feeling: headachy and exhausted

I've already completely given up on recuperating. It's not happening. This isn't a physical problem. This is a currently unsolvable emotional issue eating me up and manifesting itself physically. My soul is languishing, so I start to waste away physically.

Blah blah. It's like an ill written, mass oriented romance novel or a bad soap opera (that's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one). The heroine is languishing from her emotional distress.

Well I say...forgot that drama. Let's pretend it's not happening. I'm not going to talk about this again. It's going in the deep reaches of my closet with school situations.

I blinked slowly against the dark, hardly waking, to see my cell phone light up.

My heart leapt in my chest wondering if anyone...

I snatched it up and stared at the screen while I tried to decide what it was doing. It hadn't rung. I had no missed calls. I had no voicemail messages. I had no text messages. My heart sank down as I whispered to myself something about absurd wishing and desperation, and put my cell phone down and flipped back over in bed.

The cell phone light switched off, and I was plunged into pitch black silence.

The first thing I thought, was that my nightlight was off. Obviously, because it was so dark. I must not have turned it on before I fell asleep. It all seemed a haze now. I was unbearably ill again, and I had gone to bed far earlier than usual. I had slipped asleep before I bethought myself of turning on my nightlight. That must be it�

A vague thought slipped through my mind next, that my computer, which I leave on all night, was not humming merrily as usual, and the monitor was not glowing imperceptibly from being in sleep mode.

I brushed this off; figuring things went into deeper sleeps while I slept than I thought they did.

I yanked the cord for the light beside my bed and it didn't flip on.

The moment the light didn't come on, it dawned on me that the power was out.

There were no haunting red numbers displaying the time gaping through the blackness where my clock radio was. My heating blanket which had been stifling me in my sleep was off. This conjoined with my computer's silence and my nightlight's absence to bring me this realization.

The cell phone? Simple, it had been plugged into the charger, and when the power was out, it was like unplugging it from the charger, so the back light will flip on to notify that it's been unplugged from the charger.

All this flashed through my head in a split second.

I lounged back down in bed, knowing that it was fruitless to stumble back over to the nightlight now.

I pondered a few minutes, and wondered if the circuit had blown in my room and if I should go get my father, or if the power was out in the entire house, or if it was out on the entire block...

I looked out the window to see that no light of any kind was radiating from any of the houses nearby.

The power was out everywhere.

I settled back in bed, even by now, still rather asleep. My imagination began working over time in that huge, dark, cold lonely basement.

Was that a creak on the stairs?

Was the door being pushed open?

Was someone traversing the wood floor on the other side of my room?

Was that the alarm (we have an alarm system on our house, because it used to be the model home of this housing development)

beeping to indicate someone coming...or rather, breaking in the front door?

But if someone was breaking in, it should set off the alarm...right? Wasn't it equipped? And 911 would be called immediately and the police would come over...

But...

Watch the cats... watch how they move... watch their ears...they would hear or see someone long before you would.

What if someone comes down?

Grab your cell phone...unplug it...to be used as a light and contact for the police...

You can scamper over to your desk, snatch the scissors, open the window, and cut the screen open, quick as a wink if need be...

Do you have the cell phone? There it is...in my hands...Don't turn it on yet. Someone would hear and see that...they would know there was someone do...

Oh my gosh... What was that noise? Was that... Yes... surely... someone is there...

Oh gosh those are the lights of police sirens reflecting off the wall...They are driving around searching for the criminals prowling our housing development...

COME BACK! COME BACK! THEY'RE IN MY HOUSE! MY HOUSE! OH OH!!!!!!

And so went the thoughts in my head. Crazed notions of rapist intruders and desperate escapes. I felt like it lasted an eternity. An eternity in darkness, which almost flew before my eyes. Time is funny like that. Time is not as consistent as wristwatches and digital clocks make it out to be. The harsh harnessing of nature by technology. You can measure the liquid flow of time as well as you could regulate Niagara Falls into a tap and shut it on and off to illustrate its regularity. In our developments as a society and with all our technological advances, it is best that time has been yoked in some way, but... time is not so predictable. It is not so exact naturally. Who on earth really knows how it flows? How it acts? How do you know the true nature of Niagara Falls when it is regulated through a tiny faucet? Necessary maybe, but hardly accurate...

Anyway, I digress. Back to my story.

Shaking a little, but otherwise firm and brave, I leapt out of bed, and pushed a button on my cell phone to make the display light up. Continuing to push it (more than I needed to) to keep it on, I flashed it before me, thankful that cell phone displays are so blindingly bright. In emergencies, they can easily double as flashlights.

I cautiously made my way to the other half of the basement and flashed it all around.

No one. Not even a trace of anyone.

My heart slowed, and I relaxed. I trotted upstairs, used the restroom, and got an Advil.

Someone had been upstairs and moving. There was a candle lit. But I knew that would just be my mother's doing. She was an insomniac, and her late night TV watching had probably been disturbed by the power outage.

I snuggled back into bed with unconcern, and I had not been in bed long, when she brought me a tiny candle to exude a powerful light for my room.

I accepted it, she set it on my bookshelf, and left.

The next indescribable inconsistency of time flowed slowly as molasses and quickly as light; in attempts to fall asleep, and quick wakenings to chase one or other of the cats from the candle.

I had almost fallen back asleep entirely, when the power slowly returned, then fell back off in the blink of an eye. It was like someone had begun to turn a knob, but then quickly flipped it back around and off.

This happened again a few minutes later, although the time the power was on was two blinks of the eye rather than one, before it flicked back off.

It eased on a third time, and stayed on.

I got up and switched a few things off, reset a few clocks, and got back to bed, and quickly fell asleep.

Exciting? No, I suppose not. Ever so slightly perhaps. It was all a little surreal, and it tainted my weary world with just a little more surrealism than it needed.

I have been swimming in enough strange delusions and concepts.

People with and without faces. The underlying flaws and wretched thorns in the sides of even the best of humanity. The eclipses some people make. Wishes and their impossibiliy and their futility and their absurdity. Girls barely out of childhood bereft of eyes and all normal sight, but gifted with inner foresight which shows them the future. They without eyes, can see more and further than us with eyes. With sight... What is this inner sight? Our eyes blind us to the inside... Wonders are cherished in Utopia and trampled on and exploited in current, wretched society which knows the value of nothing. There are no happy people. Only some live in light and some in darkness. My soul is so dark. So dark lately. Everything is so dark. I live in darkness. A shadow is cast across me� How does fate play us? What strings are running to connect humanity? What is resonating among hearts and what isn't? Who cares and who doesn't? Where is everyone? Where is everything?

I'm drifting so far away from everyone...

Who is close?

Who knows now your heart?

Who sees anything anymore?

Why are you all so far away?

Why did I paddle my boat so far down river from anyone?

I'm lonely now.

It hurts when I try to sleep at night...

Why am I so far away?

Why do I feel so cold? So frozen?

The thermometer reads "apathy"...

Apathy...

My mind is so filled with unquiet...

Lonely lonely lonely lonely

LONELY LONELY

SHUT UP SHUT UP

EVERYTHING SHUT UP

I HATE YOU

I HATE IT

LEAVE ME ALONE

LEAVE ME IN PEACE

I wanted to be calm...I wanted to be happy in this entry...

It wasn't supposed to go this way...

It wasn't supposed to end this way...

I suppose I just have to try again tomorrow to do better�

before & & after