The Middle

Sometimes it's half an hour past midnight on a barely Wednesday and you should be going to bed but there is still tea left in your cup and your mind wanders. It leaves the room, scrutinises the sitting room for a while – nothing to see there either – and then ruthlessly, with permission of only its own, takes the keys and walks out the door. The November night is clear but chilly, crisp, nearly crunchy, like the leaves on the footpath. It's quiet and only artificially light: it hardly ever gets truly dark in the city.

Countryside, on the other hand, is different. One time during my few days of au pairing, I was walking back home in the dark. It was November then as well, I think. The family lived outside a small town and although modern development had delighted the residents of the somewhat rural outskirts of the town with an asphalt road, it had not (yet) brought street lights to that country road that was and still is, I presume, going through fields and forests and fields. I suppose that could be called metaphorically and literally one of my darkest days.

There are small burns in my hands, two or three, careless use of the oven, and the polish on my finger nails has started to come off in irregularly shaped bits. I care too little to do anything about that.

I have read some Donna Haraway and sociolinguistics today. I have read about the outrage to do with that one scientist's slightly tacky shirt (had we not better focusing on the actual causes for women's oppression, marginalisation, and objectification rather than on an individual shirt?) and the controversy around Lena Dunham's autobiography (had we not better criticising, should we want to do so, Lena Dunham for what she does or writes rather than for what she is – amongst other things, a woman, that is?) and I don't feel much like anything.

Continuous existence. Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow, tomorrow's tomorrow and so on.

On nights like these when you don't sleep even though you should, when you're actually resisting sleep, things start manipulating themselves. They distort, they lose their usual measurements. I don't want to go to sleep because I know I need to get up and the day will not be different from any other.

You are the one making the change. If you are not happy with something, change it. Change your attitude. Read a self-help book and/or find Jesus and/or have a baby.

Sometimes you do not want to let go of the nothingness. It's become a feeble equivalent for familiarity. Familiar = good, safe, secure, keep holding on. There might be a drop or two of self-pity but that's also just as familiar and nearly undistinguishable from the overall feeling. Certainly it's constituting for that, so it is. But it's not all and there's more and it's more complicated than that. I want to think I'm stopping the time even if for a very brief moment, even though according to my vague understanding of timey-wimey things that is largely based on pseudo-scientific articles on the Internet, that would mean that we would somehow die or stop existing or so.

Well, I can fairly confidently say that I would like to exist indeed, but I would like to enjoy a moment of not getting anxious over college, stressed about money, guilty of being a bad friend and poor daughter. It's in front of others I define myself but sometimes I just wish I didn't need to do that. That I could just be without explanations, obligations, responsilibities. No expectations, no failures.

Nothingness, mere nothingness; there is everything in nothingness.