March 21

The geckoes run and bark on the ceiling, whether courting or fighting I don't know enough about geckoes to tell. I feel disconsolate, restless, mal dans ma peau. The night feels long and not long enough: I will run out of time and have to stop reading, stop thinking, stop everything.

How like life. Yet like life, I am doing nothing with it. I am not even reading the books set for my book clubs. I am instead reading, and enjoying, the Aubrey-Maturin series of books. I read the first to see what level one should pitch a romance of the sea at, then the second and third because one can immerse oneself happily in another world so vividly painted. I am not studying, writing or using my time wisely. I am just wishing the hours away.

The light in this room is fluorescent, way too bright, and it is because of the many moths it attracts that I have such a crowd of geckoes. They are my only company: geckoes and ghosts. I am perturbed by thoughts of people who no longer want me in their lives. I did not want to be cast out. It was right: right for them, but I wonder sometimes why no one will do right for me.

If you do not care much, it costs you little to be spurned. And I'm not given to caring much: utterly careless until too late after the fact, when I am all regret that I had never bothered more (or they had, when I am feeling generous about what there might even be for them to bother with).

But if you do care, it leaves you aswim always with the unanswered (and worse, the lacking answers whose questions you would not dare to ask).

Sometimes I have a day terror and I cry out with fear. But I do not know whether I am terrified of dying; or of never having lived. So live: others seem to manage. To refuse to do so is to suffer a terminal illness.

Yet even a doctor might accurately diagnose a disease for which they know no cure. Fear not though: I am applying palliatives. Soon I will be asleep, and awake in the morning, feel good but for a dullness in the head.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:58 pm