Patterns

I have butterflies in my stomach that won't go away.

I hate them.

For me they aren't a harbinger of good things, exciting things, happy things.

For me they remind me of the feeling of 'about to die'.  They signal that I'm right on the edge of total disaster.  I'm not doing what I need to do.

And I start another impossibly busy week behind the eight ball.  Unprepared.  Not on top of my game.

I'm beginning to think this isn't my game at all, and that I was never meant to be playing.

As I lay in bed the other day, with the butterflies insistent and distracting and alarming, I told Aaron why I hated them so much.


"They remind me of the feeling I had when I laid down in your bed, all those years ago, and waited to fall asleep forever.  Waited to die."


He held me close and stroked my hair.  Then: "Sometimes I feel like you're still laying there; that you never got up; that you're still just waiting to die."


I burst into tears, because I have been living my life like that; waiting to die; somewhate reluctant to accept that I ever got up, that I stubbornly cling to an existence I had been ready to abandon, give-up, discard.


Here I am.  I persist, but only minimally.  I am alive but not really.  I am, but to what end?


And so I start another week and my shit is not together.  I start another week and without a clear game plan and falling behind deadlines and dancing with complete ruin.


And I wish I were back on that bed all those years ago.  Wish I had the chance, once again, to lay there, still and groggy, mentally making peace with the path I'd taken.  Wish I had had the guts to close my eyes and accept the fate I'd ingested, instead of panicking and scrambling for help.


OR.


Or I wish I'd woken up, taken life by the balls, and made a complete and fearsome turnaround.  Wish I'd thrown off the mantle of mourning and regret and passive suicidal tendencies, and become a completely kick-ass individual.  Wish I'd been reborn in that instant, remade into a stronger, fiercer, more incomparable individual full of fire and full of vitality because I'd looked my own mortality in the eye and told it to fuck off.


Instead I look backward at the years in my wake and see wasted potential, avoided opportunity, cowardice, cringing self-loathing, and desperate bleakness.


I see a half-dead person allowed to subsist and pass as one living.  I see an emotional zombie.  A stunted, broke, weak and pitiable thing.


And she now has to get her clothes on, get her hair and teeth brushed, and get to her meaningless job.  Unprepared for another week.  unequipped for the mess she's made for herself.  Unenthused to be breathing in-and-out-and-in-and-out for yet another loathesome, regrettable week.


What a waste she is and has been.  What an utter mediocrity.  What a lamentable tragedy of the human condition.