4 June 2000

"You seem pensive," he said to me. I'd been sitting at this computer for several minutes without moving. When I had been moving, earlier, I'd only been randomly clicking on things in a dispirited way anyhow, and finally, sensing my lack of will, I'd given up, and was only sitting.

Truth to tell, I am feeling somewhat pensive. It's an overcast day, bits of sunlight bravely burning through the clouds occasionally, their moments of glory fading almost instantly and succeeding only in making the overcast seem more grey.

It's not brooding, understand, that I'm doing. When I brood, I fixate on something and turn it over and around in my mind until I find a way to make it painful, and then I just keep poking myself with that painful edge. Pensive, for me, is almost the opposite of brooding - I feel sortof numb. Sometimes I try to move from pensive to brooding, just because after a long dint of pensiveness, I'd rather feel pain than nothing at all.

I wrote my imaginary friend a poem this morning. (What? Don't look at me like that. I've had imaginary friends since I was about four. You can't ask for a better confidant or advisor than an imaginary friend. It used to be that I'd lie in bed at night and pour out everything I couldn't keep bottled up inside to my imaginary friend. Since I have a husband in my bed at night, now, I can't do that, so I write him e-mail instead. Yes, him - my imaginary friends have always been male. They occasionally serve double duty as imaginary lovers, so it makes sense. No real friend can cross that line with impunity, but imaginary friends don't have that problem. Wait, I'm getting sidetracked. If you're actually curious, ask and I'll write about my imaginary friends sometime.)

Anyway, I wrote my imaginary friend a poem. I won't give it to you. It sucks. I've never been very good at poetry, but prose just wasn't working for me. The gist of it, though, was that darkness wasn't really void - that even the dark places within me had characteristics, that if I accepted them and made them mine, then they were nothing to fear. That the thing to fear was not darkness, but the grey of numbness, of being utterly alone, with neither friends nor enemies, neither love nor hate, neither pain nor pleasure. Grey is not calm - either light or darkness can be calm - but a roiling numbness, seeking sensation without ever finding it.

I don't know why I'm writing this now, because now my real friends who read this will think I'm depressed. I'm not. I'm numb. I'm going to finish this and then go with Matt and my parents to the local Hellenic Festival, where we will sample exotic foods and look at exhibitions and maybe make some absurd impulse buys just for the fun of it. And if I'm lucky, somewhere in there the numbness will wear off, and I'll be happy. Or maybe tomorrow morning I'll wake up and go to work and be irritable or bored or something.

But right now, I'm just numb. My mind is filled with a roiling grey, and I'm waiting for a sun to burn it off, or a seed to cause the rain to fall. I hope it comes soon.