Nostalgia

that feeling..

the feels..

i..just don't like it.

My night started off on what I hoped to be a good sign.  Lately I've been staying up later and later, which results in me waking up later and later..not a good cycle - maybe I wasn't made for 24 hour days...

Anyway, it was shortly before midnight and I called lights out..and actually fell asleep.  Naturally, that was the only good thing going for me.  My dreams played at as if concocted by some alcoholic libation...yet, we know that not to be the case.  Couldn't have been something I ate either, same food..just different results? Nah. So what is it...I awoke sometime before 4 and puzzled that very question.  Christmas..must be Christmas.

Though my dream, while sleeping, was about working at my first job...had nothing to do with Christmas...even my dreams when I was awake; those thoughts and memories that sprung out of the random darkness did not relate to Christmas.  However, I believe it has more than everything to do with it.

Just thinking about past Christmases (Christmasi?), more or less the most recent ones...like how in 2006 I spent it alone at TJs place and drunk dialed my mother.  Or how from 2007 to 2010 I worked a double for both the Eve and Day.  How in 2009 after work I had a special treat in store for me.  How in 2011 I worked til almost midnight on Christmas Eve because shit at work needed to get done so I took the responsibilities from some other guy who had plans to see his family in LA...Also in 2011 I spent it with my bosses family (who was kind enough to invite me over for the night, yet defriended me on facebook sometime this year).  

I keep trying to think what I did last year, 2012..and I cannot for the life of me remember.  I remember work around those times sucked.  I put in more hours in those three work days than I put in on a normal week...early mornings, late evenings...all for no real reason - it was actually to "get ahead of the game"..so, essentially it was work that would be work in the future, but not currently, not during the holidays, especially, right then and now..

But what did I do..who was around...did Gary go back home for the holidays...what the heck happened?  As someone who can remember the most intricate of details, those entire days escape me.

But these dreams, both asleep and awake, were very...moving.  Moving in two very different ways at that.  For whatever reason, these memories were not like normal memories; like, supermemories...memories with super cognitive strength.  The emotions these dreams stirred were intense - and these memories weren't anything powerful on their own normal accord, they weren't like seeing a picture of your first love, or smelling the scent of your grandparents home, the time you almost died in the car accident and now you look differently at certain stretches of highway..no, these were run of the mill, ordinary memories.

Yet today, they instilled something very uncomfortable inside me.

I could not go back to sleep.  I had gotten less than 4 hours, yet here I was, wide awake, being beaten down by random old memories of mopping a floor.  And as my mind went with the flow of the wandering images projected in my head, every now and then I'd be overcome with certain sensation I could not shake.  I wanted to start clawing at my skin in order to make it all go away; but I knew my roommate would not approve.

He was awake too, at least he went to the bathroom shortly after I did.  I don't think he ever went back to sleep judging by the noises come from his side of the room.  Maybe something was in the air tonight that kept us both awake.

Whatever the case may be, I never want experience anything remotely similar to whatever happened tonight ever again.  I feel as if I could live quite comfortably knowing it won't ever occur again, however, something lingering in those memories makes me believe it will come again later.

There was a message, I just didn't care to listen.

"When I die, and everyone who knows me dies, it'll be as if I never existed"