Just Avoiding

It feels like I'm kind of avoiding everything lately. Avoiding conflict, avoiding romance, avoiding my dirty dishes in the sink...This week I'm back on the food diary so I've been trying to avoid alcohol and junk food, but I caved last night into a glass of rose and tonight into a bag of Limited Edition Crunchy White Cheddar Cheetos, which are delicious.

Today in the kitchen at work, which is often full of candy, sweets, leftover bagels, birthday cake and other dangerous avoidables, I stared at a bag of Goetze's caramels, which I just love. Even though normally you only see them around Halloween time, there this HUGE bag was, sitting on the counter, ripped open yet still full. Those caramels, with the slightly gritty cream frosting center, had already been on my mind since passing their warehouse or factory or plant or something on the Amtrak, through Baltimore both TO and FROM Washington DC this weekend. I considered eating one, since I usually just push the frosting part out of the middle with my tongue and throw the caramel part away anyway, but I avoided them. In fact, I ran away from them.

Right now I'm trying to avoid all the sounds in my mind, the bits of dialogue from the episodes of "I Love the New Millenium" I watched tonight, the Sesame Street pinball number countdown song (which I NEVER knew was the Pointer Sisters!)...Images of people I talked to today, people I wish I'd talked to today...But what I really wish is that I could just avoid my own brain, just for a little while. I'm so tired.

Dreaming is exhausting. Nearly every night, my dreams take place in the house where I grew up, where my sister or my mother might make a cameo appearance. My father, who I actually got along with and who I'd still be talking to were it not for my mother, almost never shows up. Given the amount of conflict I always experienced in that house, I usually wake up more tired than when I went to bed.

Lately I've been having a different kind of dream, all with a recurring theme of joyful lust or romance or even just conquest, and then I wake up really sad, defeated, alone, full of failure. I'd just rather not dream it.

But you can't avoid your dreams unless you stay up all night with the laptop on your lap, unplugging the power cord so the brightness of the screen dims to not to blind your eyes, dry and tired from a day's worth of contact-wearing. The light of the laptop makes the room look even darker, and I think maybe I could sleep...until I close it and the street lights flood in again, along with the voices in my brain.