Not Sleeping, Not Dreaming, Just Wandering.

Went to bed before 9:00.  Cats piled around and purred their lullaby, occasionally patting with insistent paws - hey, if you’re awake you could be petting - and nestling close and comforting.

Even in sleep, I am aware of them.  If I move, I move carefully.  I don’t want to smush anyone.  It’s the same…instinct?…I had when my kids were babies sleeping beside me, to adjust my position with caution, aware in dreaming.  

Sometimes I thrash about, but it’s small thrashing, tiny movements of frustration that burst into full on flailing when the kitties grow impatient with my lack of stillness and go in search of less twitchy places to snooze.

With no one but the stuffed animals to be bothered, I am…restless…

I was dreaming frustration and pain and awoke steeped in both, caught between worlds and all tangled up in my head.  The cats were with me, all of the turmoil internal, it seems, sheets and blankets untroubled by my presence.  A tug at the top corner and you’d never know I was here.

Discomfort, pain, constant companions for years.  Count the emotional versions?  Most of my life.  The physical is more recent but I can no longer remember how it feels to not feel it.

I am…sturdy.  Heh.  I AM the brute squad.  But even sturdy stones can crumble when enough cracks form.

I’m not crumbling, exactly, although falling apart sometimes sounds kinda nice.  I suspect that I couldn’t just fall a little bit apart, though.  I’d like to think it’d be spectacular, because I’d hate to be an ordinary mess.

I hurt in so many places and so many ways and if I’m going to whine about it, I’m going to whinge it’s not fair - physical OR psychological, but not BOTH!  Both is too much, and so what if I CAN handle it?  I shouldn’t HAVE to, and the goddesses prowling at my center want to get OUT and how am I supposed to deal with them when I cannot deal with me?

And you don’t want them out.  You don’t.  They are angry and restless, too, and they don’t have friend or foe, they only have destroy and remake, which is all fine and well if you’re on the creation end of things but not so great on the destruction side, although being created is messy and frightening and occasionally hurts and keeps going, but destruction is finite, so…yeah…

While body and mind take turns with the turmoil, it’s raining outside, freezing droplets ticking against the house, rhythmless droplets sighing because even nature is at something of a loss right now, so she’s doing cold and wet and maybe freeze but not for too long because the dandelions need to come back up soon, in a few months that are only a moment when you’re a Universe.

Monks are walking for peace and masked men are openly murdering peaceful protesters in the streets and hatred isn’t even trying to pretend it’s anything else while gobbling up everything and and everyone that it hates and…

I’m tired but I can’t sleep.

No rest, not because I’m wicked, but because I am thinking, feeling, broken, compassionate, scattered, infinite, confused…human…a mind bound to a broken body, free to wander as long as I don’t move.