Time to breathe again. To work it all out. To not work it out. To stop worrying about a hundred small irrelevant posts in a day or whether it counts as “starting again” if I haven’t written in weeks. I need to stop making sense. I do need to write. I’ve been going crazy. I cry too much. I resent too much. I haven’t done what I said I was going to do nearly 3 years ago.

I said that I was going to figure myself out so that my relationship with ALF doesn’t become like everything else in my life. I’m going to do something. I need to work through the anxiety this pregnancy is causing. I need to figure out the control. I need to face my fear of death and–

I need to talk to myself. It seems false and grandiose to do that publicly and that’s how I want to do it. Otherwise I write these mental letters to other people all of the time, and sometimes I write them “for real,” but it doesn’t translate into anything worth anything… but the tension just builds if I’m deliberately narrating to myself rather than writing without knowing what is going to be said. Without caring.

I need to do something or I’ll be back on the drugs. So here I am jumping in again. Ready to drown in a mountain of shit.

I have walked when I had no choice.  When I was angry. Bored. Anxious. Tired. I have walked because of rather than despite these things. Because I was impatient. Impulsive. Myself.

I admit that my walking is recreational and not a necessity. Other than the necessity to walk. To move. To not feel that I have atrophied.

I have walked in the snow. Rain. Indoors and outdoors. Just to move. Temperatures above 100. Temperatures down to 15. Now that I own proper outer gear I want to go lower: 10, 5, 0, maybe below.

I regret that I do not walk more. That I drive anything over a few miles. That I forgo walking for convenience. Expediency. In order to cram more “activity” into a day. Activity that is rarely active.

I feel my bones. So I walk. I pretend that there is something from the past, from DNA, from somewhere dictating this. I do not think that this is correct. There is just me. But I have to walk, and so I imagine a cause.

The grove of trees was off to the side of a path in a vast public space. The grove was next to some center attraction that my mind at the moment cannot define: a building (house), a lake, a vast field, a carnival. I cannot focus on it but I know that it was huge and of no small importance and a center of something significant. The grove was kind of at the foot of a path which came down from another place and continued on around this center attraction and then diverged in several ways and went on to… I’m not sure where. Somewhere important and/or back where it had began but in a different way. The entire thing was on a very large scale and yet of the most natural and simple character. Densely populated throughout but not crowded. There was too much space for there to be a crowd. It was all immediate and visible yet impossible to focus on, allowing for privacy amongst a throng of many.

The place where the path came down from was reached by a long, mostly empty road. Dirt but clean. An abundance of undefined life (flowers, trees, places) alongside it. The path was the main thoroughfare from the large, complicated place from which I had begun. This was a road that was simultaneously impossible, long yet very short. I think that it depended on your ability and the forces against you rather than the road itself. It was relative.

I remember waking up and immediately realizing that it was too late. I’m now not sure for what or why. I do have the sense that a lot went on and occurred before I fell asleep as well as while I was asleep. I remember confusion, fatigue, a sense of the need to do some kind of damage control and failing utterly because I couldn’t see well, had no balance, was so tired. (These last three are all recurring dream motifs for me.) I also remember a feeling of peace, a room of peace, and the sleep having been so good. I don’t know at all what was going on but it was very complicated and went backwards and forwards for a long time. It was a school, a jail, a play, a hospital, a vast hive mind complicated beyond compare. There was a balcony, a counter, stairs, a team, teammates, infinite details. The thing which I should note now/here is that I have a very strong sense that the “me” in the dream, the perspective I was witnessing it from, was not that of myself.

And at some point I left the place, went on the path, had the sense of an obligation to write in relation to the grove. A million experiences may have happened to me now I really can’t say or tell. I know that intermittently the sense of fatigue, blindness, disorientation came back but that it was interspersed with moments of startling clarity. There were many flowers, vegetation, and choices all nebulous and lost to me now.

The most significant aspect of the dream, however, is that I can see it now in vast panoramic ariel swathes. Bursts of terrible clarity and visual detail even for all the vague impressionistic quality of it. The thing is that I can see it. That it is nearly as visual as “reality” or at least reality with my vision uncorrected. Visual with a heavy, heavy emphasis on vivid color. My dreams are never this way. They are very physical, sensation based, with a heavy emphasis on thought/word/idea. It is very hard for me to think in pictures and in terms of spatial relations but these are (relatively, subjectively) clear elements for me in relation to this dream. Yet the other–the physical sensation and idea/word/thought–components were/are also there.