The Twin Demons.

They've caught me, the twin demons; depression and insomnia.

I'd been doing pretty well staying away from both. Maybe today I pushed too hard. I've been exhausted lately, and today I decided I was going to get a bunch of things done, so first I called this shop where we'd ordered shelves, and yelled at them a bit about the fact that we ordered said shelves in MARCH.

Then, I took my sister's 1-yr-old to the park, so that my sister and her husband could do some heavy lifting and such without having to worry about the baby. After that, I went hunting in the storeroom for the missing piece of a table. I found it, in the workshop, pretending to be carpentry wood. Then I started assembling the table, discovered I was a screw short, and went to the hardware store. I got the screw, assembled the table, set it right-side-up, put it in the correct corner of the living room, etc.

Then I moved my computer into the living room, and hooked it up to the ADSL. Up until now, we'd been on cable, and I was a bit scared that the DSL wouldn't work, but it did.

Anyway, I'd been planning to do a few more things, but I was too tired. But I can't sleep.

And now, suddenly, my head is running through old memories. In my mind, I'm slipping on snow in Washington, DC and laughing. In my mind, I'm sitting in some unknown basement with girls from my class and singing and eating raw string beans. Somewhere there's a t.c. lying on the floor in a classmate's house, taking a Shabbat nap next to a whole group of friends. Somehow, in this time warp I'm experiencing my first weeks after aliya. I'm sitting on the steps in Givat Ram, singing to the moon and trying to juggle. I'm sharing a bottle of outcider with a guy from the boy's dorm, because I already feel tipsy just a few sips in, and I can't admit it to my roommate.

And then I'm so lost. the memories just flood and flood. There's no order. They come in chaotically. A day at the beach with my sister when I was ten or eleven, crying at the airport the summer my sister made aliya when I was seven. Playing laser tag in eleventh grade. At a kumsitz in a Holiday Inn in Pennsylvania.

It's amazing, the flood just goes on and on. I feel it like someone shouting into my mind. I can't turn off the memories. They go every which way. Happy, sad, nostalgic, the best and worst. I wonder if this is what they mean when they talk about your life flashing before your eyes.

If so, it's not the feeling you have when you jump out of a plane...

So now, I can sit here, and the demons are in me and with me. There are tears on my face, and I can't sleep. I remember I used to think that this would stop when I wasn't alone anymore, but I guess the truth is that alone comes from inside.

Still here? maybe.
t.c. Goodman