Notes From the In-Between

On an endless illder battle to unwind, to sense, to disconnect. Never here nor there nor even really elsewhere, and at some point the day ends.

Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

Last night, as of two weeks ago.

The minutes in between awake and asleep, in between sheets, blanket, mattress, with a machine breathing surplus air into my nose and an ergonomic pillow filling the space under my neck and cradling my head. The muscles aside my left thoracic spine were pulsing, vibrating. Waves not of pain so much as the tension and unease that come from unfamiliar loosening that is between release and re-grip.

I felt torn. And then I fell asleep into a dream.

In this dream, with a drunk, drunk mother, I had to keep changing homes. We arrived at the next one, it was a legit palace.

The entry hall was grand, vast, open. It all felt contentious and stressful. We were carrying a lot of stuff.

Earlier in the dream, my partner and I sat at a picnic table. My ex-husband, who really is my ex-husband, came and sat down.

I was happy to see him and introduced him to my partner, explaining that this person was both my ex and my brother. Even as I said it, I felt how strange that was.

Then something about food. 

Then the palace.

---

Lately when I wake up, it feels like an extension of my dreaming.

As if I am walking or running or leaping, and one step or jump I am in the dream and the next propels me into awake. It’s not that I wake up, as much as I am pushed out of one world into the next -- and all of it feels tense. I wake up buzzing, unsure.

These days, I’m back to trying to do the thing of going offline an hour, an hour and a half before sleeping. It helps, but I hate it.

Because it means that my head, by the time I’m between sheets, is buzzing so much less than my body is.

That may seem like a good thing. But it’s the discordance. It’s a drag, but it does gives me a much better chance of not being so buzzed, bad buzzed up, when I awake.

I often spend my days in between, careening from digital task to digital meander to digital duty and swirl in such dizzying succession. Sucubussing, sucubbused.

Never here nor there nor even really elsewhere, and at some point the day ends. 

Well, that day ends, but another begins.

The quest for dinner, once again broached too late to meet goals, then the energy and awakeness that surges right when I want it to blissfully ebb.

And then that curious battle to unwind, disconnect, sense.

---

The urge to distance myself from myself.

The in-between space that isn’t anywhere.

Bracing myself, I push against the pain and hurt myself further.

---

That time a few months ago, a few days without fatigue, I felt it the most clearly in my eyes -- that absence of heaviness.

I feel the lack of the lack of that now, lids weighted and stinging. 

Trucks drive by, rumbling the foundation upon which my chair rests, vibrating my bones that already buzz. Sirens join them, swirling my head senses, tensing the long cords stretching from jaw to neck to chest and back to bone.

When it’s heavy like this,
which is often or maybe always,
my head tilts to the right,
while my face pivots to the left in counterbalance.

I see it in a class photo from preschool. It’s been a long time.