New Abnormal

Every night these past two weeks, I wake up at around 3 AM, and the thoughts about current events rush in, unimpeded by sensory observations or cravings. I cannot deal with them, so I often scroll through articles on my phone and read about everything else until I get tired or fall asleep. Some nights, he'll wake up and chide me, then wrap his arms around me, and it's a signal to my body to finally relax. That's if I'm lucky.

This is the last day of my thirties. My colleague reminded me that at our team meeting. I wasn't even supposed to have a team meeting today because I'm on leave. But this is their busiest time, I have nothing to do (really), and I'm afraid of the volume of work that will await my return. I did more than half a day, while hating myself, of course. And I decided to trick myself by playing cheesy eighties and nineties music for a singalong... while I processed web donations.

We are calm but we have no idea what the future is going to look like. When I was a freelancer in the Philippines (we both were), I had this in a different form. I didn't know what the future was going to look like financially-- because we weren't earning more than enough to have food and a roof, maybe some luxuries-- but I knew that the world was somehow going to be the same, and I could imagine its future, which hinted at mine. Today, I just have no idea at all.

It's autumn, finally. I didn't mean "at last". I meant "oh god". This time last year, it was still very warm, and many people were still swimming at the beach. The mornings have been chilly. I saw brown leaves fallen on the ground.

The above is very pleasant. Stepping into a square of sunlight.

I dreamt about my sister last night. I dreamt that she was alive, had somehow, somewhere in the backstory, come back from the dead (or maybe had faked it). We had never talked about it, and I just accepted it as reality. We were attending a lecture. An ex of mine was there, and he'd been to the funeral or noticed all my memorial posts on Facebook through the years, so he recognised her. He demanded to know what the meaning of it all was. I felt awful about having to defend her-- I was indignant-- and suddenly I felt the dread of the realisation that she was still dead and this was just a dream chill me.

Been looking for something to warm that kind of cold. This square of sunlight did.

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The beauty of this country is so real to me. I could see the outlines of the opposite coast behind the islands today, beneath those distant clouds.