Up awake, sleep seems impossible tonight. And I was convinced just hours before that this would be the night this week that I would just completely shut down and sleep till an alarm screeched through the night and awoke from from my stress induced coma. Tonight is not that night. I'm sitting here having the revelation that in a moment like this, when I pick up the phone and want to dump about this, that when I dial that number, he no longer answers the phone. Who else can fill that void, I'm not sure. I am scared.
I realize that there are certain levels, levels of ourselves that we share with each other. From my work, and from the people i've known from the past couple of decades, most of them see quite a few "levels" from me. More levels than most people ever want to hear about in fact. I'm quite the rambler, and most people can get more of an earful from me than they ever wanted to hear. It isn't until a moment like this that you realize that there are a couple more levels down there, the ones that hardly get shared with anyone. It is at that level when the person that knows me, practically knows what I am thinking just from the look in my eye, or the stutter I get when I'm excited of stressed out, or when my uncomfortably loud laugh hits a certain pitch that they know I'm not really laughing, and its something else.
Most of my life is so out in the open to people that they hardly even realize I am having trouble with this. That's because I reserve most of this for those last couple of layers, deep down. Its really hard to get to that part of me, in fact I guard it more closely than anything. Thats the part that was crushed from my dads death in 85, and I seldom ever let anyone near it.
Aside from my wife, I find myself asking "what number do I call when I want to talk at that level now?" I stare blankly at the phone baffled by this question, and set it back down crying, realizing that of the hundreds of numbers in that phone, coworkers, old vendors, and work friends, that I can't dial any of them about this. Knowing that there are many out there that really would be willing to listen, and would genuinely care and appreciate the call from me most likely, I just don't have it in me to open that level up to them. I guard it too closely, and just can't do it.
Feel very adrift, but yet I'll go to work today and I will be just fine. And then I'll go home, and be just fine there too. I am not fine. I am not fine with this whatsoever.
Brian's passing today symbolizes the end of something for me. We all have friends, but its the seldom few, the ones you most likey grew up with that have known you most of your natural life, those friends that you will never again find in your life. He was the only one left, and now he's gone.
So now what? There are a couple of distant friends I still speak to from years past. Do I open up to them now? Do they really wanna hear about all the shit I harbor in those last dark couple of layers? Who the hell knows, but until you try, you'll never know.
Marietta, Jerome, Platte, I'm going to do my best to open up to you guys, I just don't know how to do it yet.
