I'm feeling down and nostalgic today. It could be the overcast weather, or the Alanis Morrissette CD playing for the first time in years. Or maybe it's reading the 10th Circle, and it being too close to home. In it, the wife has an affair with one of her college students. It's written from all perspectives, and I read it from Daniel - the husband's- point of view. And I remember sitting in the auditorium and seeing him for the first time, with Evanescence playing in the background, wondering if he was just playing it to make us feel like he was cool, one of us. Not at all taken with him, his looks, his manner. In truth, at that stage he was just another future male teacher who I didn't trust in case he reminded me of my father. Thinking about all the people sitting around me, already forming groups, and I above them all, silently and stoically alone. I was there for the art, not to make friends. And then I'm pulled back further, to my year 12 art room, sitting (again, alone. What is it with me and art that equals solitude?) on the floor, nearly outside completely, drawing frantically as "Thank You" by Alanis Morrisette plays on the radio. So absorbed in my art, so serious about my theme of the cycle of evil. The thought that how can any of ever be innocent again if all we've ever known is evil? I want to escape my thoughts - drown them out. I remember writing in my diaries when I was younger, to justify taking sleeping tablets, that I didn't drink, smoke or do drugs. So I lived in reality constantly, with no escape. Escape for me was sleep. I needed that deepening heavy feeling of sleeping pulling me down, so that I was aware of oncoming relief. That's what I wish for now. Sleep, escape. My thoughts flicker to this year and my breath quickens as I feel the panic attack rising in me. I think of my whole experience of overseas, and the hospital where I was treated so badly by the staff. I have to stop there, or else I start to relive it all in vivid detail and I really will have a panic attack. I wonder if there is a way to wipe my memory of it - hypnosis perhaps - and whether it is the right thing to do, to erase an entire section of your life. I wish the sun would come out.
