tired

I'm starting to wonder if my vacation did me more harm than good. I have not been able to sleep well since we got back. I feel like all I do is dream the entire night - that annoying 'just asleep' place where your body is completely paralyzed but your mind won't shut up. It's very frustrating.

Then again, my brain has been somewhat preoccupied with the misadventures of an old college friend of mine. These new, on-line social networking sites like Facebook lend themselves to surreal experiences sometimes. Saturday morning I get up, go on-line to check on my various email accounts and friends' activities on Facebook to see that this guy I went to college with had written a note that essentially amounted to his final 'good-bye' to his friends and family. At first I thought he was being dramatic - he's a writer, and most of the good writers I know write some of their best work in their most melancholy moods - but then I notice in one of the comments that his (ex?)wife was pleading with people to help her find him. He'd been missing for an entire day already.

He was eventually found alive somewhere near Thunder Bay, I think, but his letter still kind of haunts me. When I knew him, I always found him to be one of the most gentle and sweet human beings I knew. The darkness of that letter, the absolute hopelessness he expressed there, the declaration that his death would be his gift to his young daughter, as though she would be better off without him... it still makes my soul ache.

I wonder if it's lingered with me because I have come so close to that darkness. My own grief and misery exposed me in a very real way to some of those blacker human emotions. I don't know what the world has done to him, so I can't presume to understand where he was coming from, but the despair from which he wrote did have a vague familiarity to it.

Fortunately, I have a very real light to which I cling. I can only hope that some light finds him too.