I have a lot of bricks. I have been saving them for quite some time. Each one has a name. Each one has some similar characteristics but they are each a little different too. Each one represents a dream, a hope, a desire that was crushed under the weight of the brick. I hate the bricks. I hate myself for collecting them. And now I will use them to build a wall. I will seal myself off from the world, from people, from caring, from hoping, for wanting something that I will never have.
Things haven�t worked out the way I�d hoped and dreamed. Each new day is a chance for a new hope and a new dream. But when they get crushed each time you give them life, it�s hard to keep going. So I collect my bricks. I�m not saying I haven�t played a role in the failure of each one, each relationship, but it�s just what it is � a string of failures and dashed hopes.
I�m tired. I�m tired of the constant battle each day to revive the dying hope. I don�t want to be so jaded and empty, but I am, and I don�t have the strength to do much more than build the wall, brick by brick. I have enough. I don�t need anymore.
The physical pain remains a constant in my life. Last night, I went to sleep with pain in my knee, my back, my neck, my head. With pain in so many places, it�s hard to block it out, to try to get some sleep. I curled up in my nest of pillows, trying my best to support my sore joints. It didn�t work. Alleve, muscle relaxers, heating pads, combined they provided some sort of relief and I was eventually able to fall asleep.
But the sleep was far from peaceful. I woke up to traumatic dreams, being a witness to events in the dream world that I did not want to see. In one dream, I watched people fall off of a building one by one, smashed on the sidewalk. In another dream, I watched as a tidal wave washed away my home, my world, people that I knew. Although I didn�t wake up frightened, I woke up sad and disconcerted, haunted by the images of my dream world. I could not shake them, even after placing a full day between those images and the present. It�s not as bad as the dream I had where I was being knifed, as there was not that startled fearful shaking awake, but the dreams gripped me nonetheless. I realize in writing this that both dreams mimic real life events that were traumatic for the world. I don�t really know what that means. I feel as if I am trying to work out some sort of trauma in my dreams, but I don�t know what. Is it some trauma from long ago? Or is it a collection of small traumas that have affected my present?
I fight sleep tonight, partly because of physical pain � tonight in my lower back, shoulders and right elbow � and partly because I�m afraid of what I�ll see when I shut my eyes, I�m afraid of what the dream world will bring. It is far easier to build my wall of bricks and hide behind it.
