Hiatus

The last two days, I’ve had the same dream.
I’m standing on the corner of two streets in the neighborhood I grew up in. The park is just behind me on the right, the scene of the first joint I smoked; just a road beyond that is the house I grew up in. The house where my first memories were born, where some the biggest influences in my life first entered. To my left, maybe a block away is the house of the girl who was my best friend in grade school. To my right is the road that would take me to my first experiences with teen love and lust. For me, mostly the latter, for my friends, both in equal measure. Love, for me, was many years away.
I can’t figure out which way to go in the dream. I end up sitting on the curb with my head between my knees. I’m not crying. I am simply too overwhelmed to feel just one emotion. So I just sit there.
I’d have to be dead to not see the parallel in this dream to my own life right now. I feel like I am working really hard at just being okay, and it feel s so much like treading water I can’t figure out why I’m not wet. I can’t quite get to okay though. I am restless and exhausted, never quite sated in any arena, from the work I do to the meals I eat. I’ve had a headache nearly every day for the last 12 days or more. Sometimes they go away for awhile, but mostly they just retreat until I actually need to sit down and analyze data for the contract work I’m doing here and there. It forces me to write, then do something else, then go back and recheck, reword, reanalyze.
The permanent job I thought I had fell through, and while I’m grateful and lucky to have the contract work I do, the temporary nature of it is harder for me to deal with than I ever imagined. I worry all the time and the rest of the time I’m just plain sick to my stomach scared. I will be taking a couple of classes this fall, I’m considering my next degree, because what better time to reevaluate your life than when the one you were expecting to have is suddenly gone? I haven’t any idea how to pay for that anymore than I know how I’m going to pay anything else without regular work, but there I am, signing up for classes and buying rubber mulch for my empty flower beds like it’s any other fall.
I can be cheery and optimistic for the length of a phone call or email, or on a bad day just long enough to throw out a random facebook status update or to conduct a text message conversation. The rest of the time I’m wearing old sweats and thinking about the fetal position and it’s very difficult to type in the fetal position.
So yeah, now you know.