That treasure-house of memories.

(On cheap paper, April 2011)

Today I don't feel.  Or I don't want to or I can not.  I am not sure.  Maybe it is all of the those.  Or wait, no, I can feel- it is just that I am afraid of it- afraid of feeling.  I've lived in terror of my own mind for so long- it is strange to not be running from it.  I'm like a foreign animal to myself.
I wake up in the mornings now.  It has taken me about two full weeks of feeling confused to understand that.  I think I used to experience waking up from sleep as a switch from one way of my thinking to another.  What is happening now is that every morning I am aware as I shift from sleeping into awakeness; into the consciousness of being awake and thinking.  It is so odd.  For the past couple of weeks I really couldn't totally understand what was happening and I kept saying to Christopher, "Something weird is happening in the morning.  It is something weird."  And I really couldn't figure it out.  I kept trying to describe to him this strange thing that was happening each morning... I was having thoughts and remembering bits of dreams and they were mixed and unmixing and I was aware of it.  
I've started being present for my own waking up from sleep in the morning and I've never really been able to experience it fully before.  It still feels very strange- to wake up and have my thoughts as opposed to flipping a switch in my mind from sleeping right into some way of being me.  Waking up is strange... both the literal waking up from sleep which I am more aware of now each morning and also the literal waking up from the dissociative coma in which I have both lived and yet not been able to fully live for all of my life.

"And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?"  ~Rainer Maria Rilke