When I woke up around 6 a.m. Monday, I felt sick at my stomach. I hadn’t been able to get to sleep until about 4 a.m. and then I had awakened every few minutes after that. By 6, I had been sleeping long enough to feel disoriented but not long enough to feel any sense of rest.
Through the fog of exhaustion, I had a feeling so disturbing that I forced myself to wake up enough to make a few notes before I fell asleep again and forgot.
“I know how to feel terrible and something in me prefers that, because I know how to deal with it,” I typed on the iPhone note. “This is a terrible feeling, but as terrible as I feel, I have a strange sense through the grogginess that this is easier to deal with than being happy — because I know how to deal with what this feels like. I’m not entirely comfortable being happy, because I don’t have enough experience with it.”
I suspect that being exhausted and half asleep allowed me to consciously feel something that lurks unnoticed at other times. And I can’t quit thinking about that.
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love