Tag: loneliness

#oneaday, Day 127: Good Morning, Sleepyhead

Pro-tip: Colouring in things with a mouse is a pain in the arse. Don't start it, because then you'll have to finish it.Good morning! Well, it's nearly 2AM after all. That traditional blogging time, you know.

So I've been by myself for some time now after a long time having someone beside me almost constantly. And the thing that's struck me the most is how one's perception of time changes. Or maybe it's not the perception of time, it's the brain associating certain activities with certain memories and wanting to distance itself from them. Or, to simplify matters, it's about the messed-up sleepytime routine of the lonely man.

Take going to bed. I've found it quite difficult to make myself go to bed at a reasonable hour. I never was particularly good at it at the best of times, but if the occasion demanded it, I could be in bed before midnight. Before 11PM, even. But now? Staying up late isn't particularly unusual. This isn't some attempt to take full advantage of my new-found and not-particularly-enjoyable freedom. It's simply that going to bed means spending time alone in a dark room. Which, as anyone who has ever suffered through depression, stress, or any sort of crisis (all three of which I'm suffering right now) will tell you, is a sure-fire way to get one's brain thinking about things you don't really want to think about. So my body convinces itself that it's not tired and doesn't want to go to bed yet. So I don't. Eventually I will collapse into bed and sleep, but it's only once I really can't go on any longer.

The side-effect to this is, of course, that it's sometimes a bit difficult to wake up in the morning. But not only that. Having grown accustomed to waking up alongside someone else and having that presence there to spur you on to face the day, whatever it might entail, it's a shock to the system to suddenly have to do all that yourself. I can wake up early, sure. But getting out of bed? More difficult. When it feels like there's not much to get up for – and certainly no-one waiting for me to get up – it becomes easy to just lie there staring into space or worse, fall asleep again. This is, of course, enormously impractical and could probably be rectified by going to bed a bit earlier, but because of the aforementioned reasons, that's difficult too. Vicious cycle, you see.

It's not as if I don't keep myself busy, though. If I stay up late, it's not just to stare at a wall or sit there in floods of tears, though both of those have happened at least once recently. No, I find something to do. I find someone to chat to. I write something. I draw something. I play a game. I harass people on Twitter. Anything to avoid having to sit in that dark room trying to get to sleep, failing and hearing that little tap-tap-tap of the unpleasant thoughts come a-knockin' on my brain. It's a distraction, though, not a substitute.

So the moral of this story, then, is don't be alone. It sucks.

#oneaday, Day 118: Homecoming

It is like a ghost house. Haunted by shadows of the past, and yet at the same time pristine and new, full of possibilities, like it once was so long ago.

In through the door, into the hall. A door, usually shut, stands open, looking in one direction. Beyond the door, the darkness of the night creeps in. The other doors remain steadfastly shut, waiting for me to reveal their contents, be they painful, joyful or wrathful.

Passing through the open door, its inviting portal beckoning me within. Flashes of terrible possibilities scream through my head and I wonder if any of them are true, but none of them are. Everything is as it was, only with a layer of meaning removed. Floor once well-trodden with hard labour stands pristine and new as if nothing had ever been there. There is space, empty space, but imperceptibly, outside the gaze of reality, the memories are still there. There they sit, watching stoically, not judging, just being. But then they are not there and there is just space again.

The space we once shared together forever changed, only a discarded sleeping bag and some crumpled cushions holding memories of what once was and what eventually came to be. And the silence. The silence is deafening.

Back into the hall. Hand trembling, I open a door. A door I feared to open. Inside are nothing but spirits. What the room once was there is no trace of, not physically. But the memories are here too. Standing in the corner. Stretched under the window. Sitting in the single lonely chair. They are here, looking at me, not a trace of judgement in them. Do they have faces? I can't see, and then they are gone again.

Back to the hall. Hand trembling, I open another door. Another door I feared to open. Inside it is like the room behind the open door, everything as it once was but with a layer of meaning stripped away to reveal – what? Is there deeper meaning left beneath?

I sit. Two crystallised memories stare back at me, in physical form this time. I wondered if they would remain strong or shatter like everything else. But they are here. It fills me with great sadness and great joy to see them, for they represent the good times. They were alive, and took in everything that once was. Do they still live? They do, but they do not understand. Part of what gave them life has gone, but the other part remains. Do they still live? They do. And they bear a missive.

The message should make me weep, or wrathful, or sicken with heartbreak, but it does not. Something about it is calming. Perhaps its words merely float on my surface to be absorbed at a later time. The meaning is there and was already there, but right now I do not feel it. I feel little but reality loosening its bonds on my mind and my soul.

I rise off the ground and float through this home, this place of memories, stripped and gutted of part of that which made it what it was, and I feel…