October 11–17, 2002 — Lying wide awake

I toss and turn for hours before I can sleep. This started a few months ago, around the beginning of the summer. It’s been getting worse and worse. I’ll often get up out of bed four or five times and sit back down in front of the computer to code web pages or to write. Some nights refuse to end.

When I do sleep, it’s normally only for a few hours. Then I wake up again, go to the washroom, and sometimes fall back to sleep. Sometimes not.

Amy thinks its anxiety. I don’t know what it is. It’s been getting worse since I started my new job.

Since I last wrote a journal entry, some things happened in my life that made me decide I had reached new lows. Two things especially.

The first came after Kerry mailed me a DVD she borrowed while we were still together. When it arrived, there was no note and no return address.

My sister visited the same day. I told her about the DVD, and I asked her if she thought I should send Kerry an email thanking her. She remembered me telling her about the email Kerry sent after she broke up with me, after I mailed her a letter along with a book I’d borrowed and some books for her birthday. The email said, “Thanks for the books and good wishes.” That was it. My sister suggested I send Kerry an email reading, “Thanks for the DVD and good wishes.” I laughed. I ended up sending an email with the bit about good wishes excised, not as keen as my sister is on spitefulness.

But I considered it for a second. I have no right or reason to try to hurt Kerry at this point, and I still considered it. I felt terribly petty.

The second sign that I had reached new lows came when I realized that my bitterness and sadness were turning into parodies of themselves. This took many forms, none as concrete as when I woke up one morning and read over what I had written the night before when I couldn’t sleep.

I was comparing happy memories of people that I don’t see anymore with the bathroom light that I still reach for but that never turns on. It was poorly written, melodramatic, and probably stolen from a Bright Eyes song.

And that was my turning point. Regret and longing can give you something to write about, or they can make you write things that are embarrassing for the reader and that should be embarrassing for the writer.

So for selfish reasons and in the interest of never waking up to such terrible writing ever again, I decided it was time to let go. And keeping in the vein of selfishness, I wrote Kerry another email, a longer one this time. I felt better after writing it, and better still after sending it. It wasn’t cruel or vicious, but I feel guilty for forcing Kerry to think about things that she’s probably long since stopped thinking about. Though I might be flattering myself by pretending that my email had any effect on her at all.

But yes. Selfish or not, I feel better. Days later, I still feel better. My past attempts at letting go only lasted, at most, for twelve hours, so I think this is definite progress. Whether it keeps or not is anyone’s guess.

Aside from being embarrassing, these thoughts had also been providing me with too easy an escape. By concentrating on the minor details of a relationship that ended almost five months ago, I was able to avoid living my life for days at a time, to avoid thinking about things that I could actually change.

It became an extension of my other little obsessions. Things that I can chip away at, never completing, never looking at any larger picture. Should it really concern me which typefaces are used on subway platforms or on the covers of Joy Division records? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop me from spending days searching. Anything to distract me from the months I’m wasting.

When I’m not obsessing over things that don’t matter, I just end up letting life go by at enough of a blur that I still don’t have to deal with or feel much of anything. When I’m working my span of three days at work, that’s all I’ll do and all I’ll think about. Three days will fly by in what feels like one.

And then I have four days to obsess over insignificant details.

Or, if that fails, I can go back to lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. Maybe if I do enough of it during the day I won’t have to do so much of it at four in the morning.

Though I’m skeptical.