Your life over the past few weeks blurs all together into random nearly unmemorable flashes of partial events when you try to think back. Still life snapshots of the world around you, taken through your eyes. The line between dreams and real life doesn't seem as solid and dark as it once was. Oftentimes you find yourself waking up and getting ready for work - the same way you do every day, unthinkingly, and wishing you could go back to bed and slip back into your dream world. Sometimes when you sleep lately, people who were once such an important part of your real life in the past come back to spend time with you in some surreal mix of your childhood and the recent past. When you wake up, you find that you miss them.
You've realized as the holidays fade into memory and a new year dawns on you that you are no longer sad, but at the same time you are rarely happy. During the week you keep yourself busy at work, usually the last to leave the office, the only one of your co-workers that has nothing much to return home to besides a big empty house.
Weekends are spent working at the kitchen table or at the coffee shop. Random encounters with people you meet when you venture out don't bring with them the hope of new friendship or love that they once did, they are simply meaningless communication - never a connection. You wonder if you are the one keeping them at arm's length, or if everyone who meets you can sense that you are a closed door and doesn't bother trying to get to know you.
The weather is cold out these days, you remember reading something in the news about global warming causing record low temperatures all around the world. So you don't venture out much, chosing instead to keep your own company in a house full of ghosts, a house you can no longer afford, or even want to be in.
You wonder as you sit in the kitchen ignoring the TV what it would feel like to put a nicotene patch on your balls.
You wonder if anyone is ever really as happy as they appear to be in movies.
You think about what it would be like to start life over somewhere else, maybe somewhere you don't speak the local language.
You wonder what would happen if you smoked a pack of cigarettes while wearing an aforementioned patch.
Maybe you wonder how long it would take for someone to break down your front door and find your decomposing and nicotene-stained body slumped at the kitchen table.
But mostly you wonder if you would be able to fall asleep, and if you were, what dream life you'd slip into, whether it would give you a momentary and subconscious reminder of what it felt like to be happy, to be with people you loved, and to feel as though they loved you back.
