Feeling, late at night, peculiarly disconnected, dislocated: not merely in time and space, but in intention, in dream – I feel as though I don't know who I would want to have been, what I would want to have happened.
Regrets, as you no doubt know from the rest of my blog, are not unusual for me. Many things dissatisfy me, some grieve me, many things are not what I wanted them to be; I can be philosophical about some, others not so much, though I'm certainly not as angry or resentful as I used to be about it all. I would like for things to be different, but –
Trying to go to sleep: but my mind is, for some reason, trying to construct my life as I would have wanted it to happen. And I can't settle on anything at all: nothing looks right, nothing looks plausible – any place, any position I would find myself in now, seems like the most undeveloped of two-dimensional pasteboard fantasies, or something shot through with problems and flaws, or something that I doubt would actually have been good anyway. What if Dad had put in for a patent and we were all rich, what if I had gone into the sciences, what if I had moved to New York, what if the virus had never mutated, what if I had made so many different choices at so many different points, what if....?
Perhaps some of these feelings of vertigo are because of recent applications, attempts, dreamed-of changes: applications for things I may or may not get – and of course things that I may or may not want, and the wanting is largely contingent on where I am now in my life (which raises the query: am I working hard to get to places I don't even want to be? – a not unusual situation, of course) but hardly contingent on, well, anything else. As though there is no back, no solidity, to any of these things, or to anything that I might want or might have now: as though it is all pasteboard – it doesn't much matter what cards I draw – because they're only cards.
It is perhaps not unexpected, living alone far from anywhere I ever imagined living, in circumstances that aren't rooted in any of my earlier dreams or plans, that I would have the feeling sometimes that if I turned too fast or reached out carelessly, I might inadvertently rip through the backdrop. Or might accidentally wander off the set, into some dusty, incoherent backstage of battered plywood and discarded props. But this is more like an internal dislocation, as though I've lost some internal compass or gotten some internal rudder tangled, making me feel that I can't even imagine where I would want to be – or, more accurately, and more uncomfortably, who I would want to be.
Oddly disorienting. It's as though – I can't sleep, because – I don't even know what to dream about...
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