slender_is_the_night raze your arms have grown too thin to hold me. i'll only make you doubt your own strength. what the absence of light takes away the day returns, and after almost forty years of being slept in and loved on and trying to forget its own name, this house of organic tissue is caving in on itself. impulse to ash. stone to dust. i'm dying, i'm dying, i'm dying, i know. so are you. but an ending can last a long time. and my arms are stronger than they've ever been. so let me be the one to hold you now. 210922 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Wordplay for branching associations: just one thing I like about your pieces. If I try to interpret the object, I'll get it wrong (a piece of fabric? furniture? person? place?) but it will still be a trip. 210924 ... raze so kind you are to me, kirsten. so yoda-like i am blathing in this moment. at the risk of ruining the mystery, i was talking to the night itself here. the pre-sleep anxiety attacks have come back with a vengeance over the last little while, and they've developed a new wrinkle. now instead of hitting me as i'm about to fall into sleep, my brain waits until i've relaxed into that thin first *layer* of sleep for a while before ripping me right out of it, and then i have to try and convince myself i'm not having a stroke. every time it happens it gets harder to make myself believe i'm not going to die, and to restore some sense of equilibrium. a few nights this week i thought i really was dying and there was no way to climb out of it. there was this almost physical sensation of fighting against something that was trying to end me. it's been a while since i've felt that kind of terror on a regular basis. it only lasts for ten or twenty seconds a shot, but they're some of the longest seconds i've ever lived through. i thought if i wrote a little love letter to the night, maybe it would put in a kind word for me with my brain and convince that thing to leave me alone for a little while. the jury's still out on how well it's going to work in the long term, but last night was better. baby_steps? 210924 ... e_o_i That sounds both frightening and frustrating. I'm sorry that you're going through that. The last time my body did the wake-up-just-as-I'm-falling-asleep thing was funny rather than frightening; it was one of those "tripping over something" dreams where you wake up with an involuntary leg-jerk. But this time it was quite a strong kick, like I was trying to fight the blanket, so it made me grin. My usual form of "waking up thinking I'm dying" is when it's a sudden awakening after a couple of hours of sleep, or when I'm overtired or worried. Then it's like a regular old panic attack: my heart beats fast and I feel weak and anxious. I feel like I HAVE to talk to someone, which, when I've been alone in the building, has led to me phoning 911/Julia/my parents - not a thing I want to do. Best and simplest strategy, for me, is to breathe slowly, counting in my head as I do so or holding my watch to my ear. But I have to keep at it for a few minutes so panic doesn't overwhelm me again. And then writing or drawing helps. Over the past couple of years, the nighttime panic attacks tended to happen more when I was alone in the house, so my not-quite-on-purpose solution was to not sleep or sleep very little, which didn't do much for my anxiety either. That's why it was a relief that I could sleep properly earlier this month when my parents were away. And then there are weird sleep things that come and go. The creepy one is a tactile illusion where I feel something touching me, esp. on my back, but it's kind of cool neurologically. Another bothered me for one summer and then went away: getting stuck between sleep and waking, not being able to move or open my eyes for a few seconds - this was more frustrating than scary, but some people get sleep paralysis plus nightmares, which doesn't sound fun). That mostly happened if I slept in. 210924 ... e_o_i Hey, there's an unmatched bracket. So lonely. I will match it with this: (. May they find parenthetical love. ...Oh yeah, and there's being reluctant to sleep because I'm afraid of dreaming about certain things - not necessarily things that are scary inside the dream, but that frighten me when I wake up. Like being guilty of some terrible accident. Circa 2014: I'm at some outdoor concert, I lift my hands in the air, and the air currents stirred by this move cause a balcony to fall, sending two children to their deaths. On the surface, this sounds a bit goofy, but if you're dealing with guilt in real life... By contrast, the "haunted mansion" dream I told you about this summer (the one that began with you missing an invite to play a concert there) was absorbing, multilayered, and I wouldn't wish to NOT dream it. 210924 what's it to you? who go blather from