Discombobulated

I have a friend who's...well, it would trivialize it to say she's in a bit of a mood. She's got reasons, damned good reasons, for feeling the way she does right now. I don't know if there's anything I can do to help her, but I do know she's not in a receptive mood right now. I miss - well, that's just being selfish. I want her to get back to where she needs to be, not necessarily where I want her to be.

Almost the same goes for another friend who has to find her way back into this world. I'd like things back the way they were before, but that would be very destructive for her.

I had a dream about another friend a week or so ago. This was a friend I knew from about 1999 through 2003, but the dream was set, as far as I can gather, in 1986. College. My sophomore year. I've realized whose apartment it was set in, and all the feelings I associated with the person who lived there.

1986 was a long time ago. Nearly a quarter of a century. Just two years after the first time I had fallen completely, insanely in love. Then, as now, as always, I was stumbling through life, trying to figure things out as I went along. In 1986 the future branched out before me in an infinite number of pathways. In 2009 the same thing is true. But in the peculiar way of the mathematics of infinity, the infinite number of pathways available in 2009 is much, much smaller than the infinite number of pathways available in 1986.

I press my shoulder against the machinery of the universe, trying to nudge things back into a configuration I am more comfortable with. Some things I can change. Some things I cannot.

It pains me to see friends in pain. It is worse to see them standing on a precipice. Will they step back to safety? Or forward into the unknown? I don't know.

I am tired. First night back at work after four days off. Now I will sleep. Maybe I'll have more dreams. Maybe they'll remind me again of who I once was, and who I am now, and what I can be, and where we can all go.



Update, 9/15/09: I think Ryan North is now cribbing Dinosaur Comics ideas from my site - specifically, the fourth paragraph in this entry! That, or we think along the same lines. Both good!