the endless struggle to allow ourselves to enjoy

Nothing placates me like a brooding thunderstorm. Its looming presence and wondrous strength encompasses my wilting spirit. Perhaps it is because, I too feel like a cloud, a ball of dust and air, ready to explode with anger, fury and excitement. They have said here, off the coast of Lake Como, that the weather has been beautiful for the last week or so, and upon my arrival, a fleet of painted clouds in an encompassing sky linger over this once dreamed of secluded remnant of heaven on earth.

This place I am staying is something like a prison cell. 5 by 8 feet maybe, it is dank, dark, lonely, and loud. And in this hour of my discontent, I feed my depression like a cavernous lagoon, incapable of reaching its limit even with torrential rain. I sit now in front of a mirror, to my left a grand Elizabethan style window overlooking lake Como, and to my right a pile of my shit- cloths, books, too much for one person to use them-self. I am alone. I am only with the person looking back at me. She is someone I once knew. That girl there, blankly looking out at me, I have seen full of light, I have seen eager and anxious, I have seen sad and tormented. I have seen her in a mirror too, I have seen her curled up in a ball- dirty, un-showered, unkempt, incapable of moving or speaking. Yet now when I look at her I see nothing but he physical attributes of someone you recognize as a shell of yourself. Her hair is flaky and dried, like the skins of sacata bugs late in August, ones that we used to lay on my mothers pillow as a torturous nagging jolk at her insecurities. I do not think I realized my sister and I were subconsciously poking at her inability to accept age, but now I realize that is what has resonated most in me from my mother. I have her hands. I see them developing transparent skin and predominate blue veins. I see my incapacity to accept life as a system of days that leak towards an ultimate end as the most pressing characteristic i inherited from her. I see my fathers round face and sloping nose. I look like him. I feel like her. She was trapped in repression, I am trapped in ultimate freedom. Like Milan Kundera says, The unbearable lightness of being. I feel that lightness to be unbearable, but its weight to be crushing. It is like a large slow snail creeping up your bare chest in the middle of a sticky summer night sucking the air out of your blackened lungs. In sleep we find solace and in that paralysis of solace we find the inability to act in the realm of physicality.

I had my first flying dream the other night. An exhilarating feeling to soar through the air. I could see the ocean and its great blue depth. But I got too close and nearly drowned in my sleep, I lost the ability to fly and even swim and was stranded in an encompassing abyss that thrust y heart to the greatest caverns of the oceans mystic. The next night I dreamt of a haunted house and being chased by a spirit who eventually, as i reached the exit, caught hold of my boot and sucked on my toe, sucked the energy or life or soul or something out of me. I woke up feeling exhausted and confused. I dreamt the next night of a talking half langosteing half cockroach that was trying to crawl into my womb. I killed it eventually and woke up again, half battered half invigorated half realizing my dreams are too powerful over my paralytic mind.