insomniac

i can't sleep! and i can't make this time productive. i amble about, eat, get on the computer... the air is chilly (by hawaii standards), the rain outside, i can feel it seep in through the screens and kiss my exposed skin (i'm NOT nude, btw; an ugly image, sorry).

there is no rest.

i think of radiohead lyrics:

"we're too young to fall asleep
too cynical to speak
we are losing it-
can't you tell?

scratch our eternal itch
our twentieth century bitch
we are grateful for
our iron lung."
-iron lung

or:

"it barks at no one else but me
like it's seen a ghost.
it must see the sparks a-flowing
no one else would notice...."
-the tourist

i blame my mental perambulations (right word? right context?) on my sister... maybe wherever she is (in an undisclosed location), her thoughts are running like rats in mazes, and myself, an epiphenomenon of her, am simply having thoughts jog, they suffer from "restless leg syndrome" and they haven't the peace to settle in and sleep...

i hate myself relentlessly, but what good will it do? i distract myself relentlessly, but what good comes of it? the minutes, the seconds, they stretch onwards towards no conclusion.

outside, the rain is pouring harder. no doubt, the feral cats (there are two, a mother grey-striped, and her kitten, black with white socks) are snuggling somewhere in my backyard, perhaps under the junipers, or perhaps beneath the corner snow bush. sometimes, when it is raining really hard, i can hear them mewling, as the water streams down the valley behind the house into an audible surging rush, into the darkness, relentlessly down and away... i worry at times that something will happen, and the kitten will succumb. (there used to be two kittens, by the way...)

[tangent]
sometimes in the morning, the cats walk by the screen as we're eating breakfast. for some reason, although they supposedly have damned good sight at night, they don't see us through the screen, or perhaps we're only dim shadows. the mother cat is always so cautious, hanging back, while the kitten prances inches away from the screen. sometimes i put a plate of milk out, and i notice that, though the kitten incautiously laps it up, the mother cat is always a distance away, "on guard."

it must hurt terribly to have lost a child.

[return]
the force of the water surging in the valley is sometimes so strong that there is a geyser that is visible when it tries to enter into the underground gutter. detritus and garbage have dammed up the entrance, and the water has no choice but to slam at it and rebound upwards (temporarily) to the sky. i remember it strange seeing this dim and silvery shape (like a ghost) in the valley, in the dead of night, in the middle of a storm, with its hissing, thundering voice.

how the rain washes the world away. but it has a violent pull to it at times. and if we're not careful, how it steals the baby with the bathwater.

...

people are unpredictable. they pretend facades are real, that they have it all "together" under their skins. and yes, in my working world, in my daylight life, i must support that illusion, i must make people believe in their skins and their eyes. it is the best thing i can do in this world. but in my insomniac dreamless nights, i can't contain my guts, everything spills out, and even these rambling words cannot contain the water of this storm...

you can't walk on people. you can't depend on them. if you do, they may cave in on you. or cut you. tread carefully in this world. have a care for it, because there may be sinkholes or broken glass... the nighttime speaks this truth to me, the lie of the daylight world: surfaces are fictions that ultimately do not hold.

...

do i care, or do i merely pretend to care? if i really cared, then wouldn't i have prevented things from happening? i had my suspicions and doubts, but i didn't act on them. and even without those doubts, i did nothing to "keep in touch." i used the stock excuse, "i'm busy, i'm busy, i have my own life, my own responsibilities."

maybe it was the same a couple of decades ago, when i went away to college, when problems surfaced, all i could do was mewl about how lonely i was up in massachusetts, always thinking the balance of angst and ennui was on the far side of the north american continent, surely not in the middle of the island in the middle of the pacific, surely not within my sister, in beautiful f**king mililani town!?

take me back. i want to go back and redo it all over. this time, i'll know what was important, and the words i should've said, and the ... i don't know ... the mistakes i should've avoided. and my little dramas, i'll have seen them for what they were, nothing at all.

the real problem was at home.

it is always at home, restless, sleepless, insomniac.