It was like the moment refused to go unheard.

At precisely 4:57 am, I bolted upright in my bed.

I’d dreamt anxious dreams….of demons in the room, of abstract nerves… of pressure and drowning.

Finally as I sat up, I felt I could breathe again, but only to take in a stunningly painful realization.

I have no idea who I am, even though I have not changed in at least three years.   Because I have not changed in at least three years.

Cloaked in stagnant shadows, I huddled around my knees.  Though exhaustion made me teeter dangerously, my eyes were stubbornly locked open, focused on the void,  while terrifying thoughts jostled through my brain.

I have accomplished nothing.

I have no desire to be who I am.  

For years, I’d tried to find myself through relationships, through others… tried to define my existence through vessels I thought were appropriate, outwardly, but that I do not fit... and in so doing, have lost who I am entirely.   I have diluted my dreams, my drive, my passions in others and they each carry a piece of me, unknowing.  I gave it freely, but now... it has all settled.  I have settled, for and into something intangible and vague.

In the dark, I am nothing, going nowhere. There is no direction without substance, without a vehicle for motion.  Alone, I have become meaningless, like those shadows ever-encompassing.

The terrible clarity hit me in the silence, but I made no sound even while tears streamed down.

Even now, a few hours later, the effects have ebbed… but I promised myself that despite the comfort of daylight, I would not forget what it is I learned, and what it is I should be doing.

Now if only I had the courage to be who I wanted.

Because as 4:57 AM whispered to me, time is deceivingly finite.

Possibilities = limitations

I spent another weekend in the company of great friends, visiting other great friends in the Toronto area.  For the sake of information, Montreal (where I live) is about 7 hours away from where my friends live, in another province altogether. 

While I personally find such distance to be merely a trifle on the adventure of life, compared to say, my other friends in Southern California, (HAY GUYZ) visiting there nevertheless makes me feel… “funny”, for lack of a better word.

To be more specific, it gets me sort of pensive and a little down.  (Wow.  Me getting emo, who’da thunk it, OMGWTFBBQ)

You see, I met most of these people completely at random, on the internet.  Being an ever-cautious adventure-seeker, I went down there one fine night with some buddies of mine on a road-trip five years ago to meet them and the rest, as they say, is history.  Fun people, great friends… a whole province away.  (And let me tell you, provinces are big in these here parts.)

On some days, I marvel at how technology like the internet has the power to bring people together like that.  In any other time, the likelihood of having met those people would have been well, next to nil.  And yet here I am, with a network of friends not just there, but at various places in the world whom I visit and expand my views of the world through.  Such experience is priceless to me, and I hope to keep doing it for years to come.  Widening my horizons is something I hope I never lose touch with.

On other days though, it’s hard.  Because every time I visit these friends or others elsewhere, I realize they all have their lives, and even if for a brief moment, we intrude on each other’s microcosms and have a great time, the rift in normalcy eventually has to seal itself up again, and Voyager has to continue its journey back to… *cough* … Ok, space metaphors BAD.  Point is, I sometimes wish I could be more directly a part in those people’s lives, but I usually conclude that it couldn’t happen.  And also, that it shouldn't, because then the "specialness" of it all would become ordinary.  Ironic.

I mean, functionally, everything is possible.  You get a job, you find a place, you move your stuff, whammo: possible.  But emotionally… to uproot one’s entire life is a sacrifice I don’t think many people are ready to make, just for the sake of lived experience.  I’m not sure I could leave my family and friends for the sake of discovering new friends and places in a more permanent sense, and I wouldn’t expect the same from my friends over there either.  And yet, I don’t feel I’ll be giving up traveling anytime soon.

So in the end, that notion kind of always taints my visits with this overwhelming feeling of bittersweet pointlessness… the kind worthy of those epic nihilist animes like Evangelion, because it feels like at some point, the connections I have there will most likely evolve into nothing more but memory.

The awareness of such things is painful. All experiences eventually become nostalgia… and yet we humans delight and grow through making them. 

So the possibilities turn ugly.  The more traveled I become, the more overwhelmed I get.  The world is so big… I want to see so much, and yet preserve those bonds I have and cherish, both with the people I have here, and elsewhere.

It’s a tough balance to keep.  Because visits are fun, but also painful. 

But then again, I’m a strangely dark little person.