2002-10-16 - 4:10 p.m.
take what you can from your dreams...it'd take the work out of the courage.
i've been thinking a lot about my life here, and why it feels so oppressive sometimes. and i know that much of it is because of what i've vaguely referred to as "working through things with my family." it could more appropiately be described as hell. its like the agonizing moments before the doctor comes out to tell you that he's sorry, the patient did not make it through, or perhaps like ticking of the clock while the judge prepares to declare not the verdict but the sentence. but then again, i always was a little melodramatic.
i suppose it is difficult because for so many years i thought that my parents had it all together. and see, the thing is, they've got one of the best marriages i can think of... and they had a great sex life. how can you have a bad marriage if you have a great sex life? but it's as if the dissettling dawning of this realization has been coming for a while - years, perhaps - and it only just now broke over our heads like the painful light of some sort of nuclear explosion. and all i can say is that if this is what marriage is like, there is no way in hell i'd go there. and i'll admit, i'm impressively cynical right now. not only am i personally jaded concerning love and it's likelihood in my own life, but i'm also cosmically disillusioned with it as i see my prototypes of all things male, female, grown-up, etc. are at a point of wondering if they should have stayed together in the first place. (they can't even remember why they fell in love, and if they can, the other person no longer maintains that quality...)
now the strange thing about all of this is that i don't feel like i can leave until some conclusion to all of this can come about. i have to know how the story ends before i can begin my own... thus, i am tied to this place, though all i really want to do is run far, far away, and never think about it again. but another part of me feels like if i did that, everything would fall apart... it reminds me of this dream that haunted me when i was a kid; it was about a dying moth. really nothing happened in the dream, i just remember finding this moth that was dying, and i knew it was dying and there was nothing i could do about it, and yet i somehow felt responsible for it. i woke up with the most sickening, clastrophobic desire to get away from this thing that needed me so much. but then again, it may not need me so very much. i think i've had an exaggerated sense of self and my role in the world. i always saw myself as the strong one, the one who took care of everything when mom could not pry her pain-racked body out of bed for months and months, when dad was so overworked that we hardly saw him. i was the one who always had the word of wisdom, the special insight that shifted focus and made everything suddenly fall into place for some fawning young fan. and some of these things are true, in their fashion. and to compound this conviction, when i finally left, trusting that all i had maintained for years would be self-sustaining by now, it all fell apart. and i do mean everything. i've been carrying a vague sense of guilt ever since. but having voiced these adolescent perceptions of reality, i am seeing how ridiculous they are. hmmm... what a wonderful relief to find that i may not be so important after all.
