For the past few months I’ve had difficulty sleeping through an entire night. Most nights I wake up from nightmares revolving around a few different themes, predominantly suicide, a sense of loss and hopelessness. This may be hard for you to understand as generally my writing is incredibly cheery and heartwarming.

A few months ago one of my friends committed suicide. We weren’t that that close but it was one of those cases where you seem to form a bond immediately. I met him at the internship; he was the web developer, the person I interacted the most with both professionally and on a personal level. We often went to lunch at the restaurant next door to the office, where he ordered a cheeseburger every day. He was a decade older than me, divorced and a workaholic. I don’t know why he was divorced; I never asked. He was a workaholic by choice, to keep occupied, to distract himself from his self-imposed loneliness. Outside of work he frequented a Chinese restaurant and a pizza place but brought the food back to his house. I think he had a cat but I’m not sure. I know on Friday nights he looked forward to online gaming with some friends, which he had been doing with the same group of guys for nine years or so; outside of work that was his only social interaction. He told me he didn’t know what to do with himself on the weekends so he normally worked from home.

I’ve had a few friends who have killed themselves before but they were from childhood and I hadn’t spoken to them in a long time. Looking at our lives, even in middle school, I wouldn’t have thought it too strange to have heard years later they would kill themselves. I didn’t think Dan would kill himself. From my estimation when talking to him, I was even more depressed and dissatisfied with life than he was, though not as nearly isolated. He didn’t like his job but didn’t hate it and he at least seemed to get satisfaction out of it. He was well-liked and people frequently tried to get him to chat and to go out to eat with them.

Dan took a bunch of pills and hopefully died peacefully and with a feeling of solace, the freedom of not being bound. From another friend I heard he had tried before. He never mentioned it to me and I’m surprised I didn’t see more anguish in him when we last talked, though that was a month or so before he died. I don’t blame him for killing himself nor do I think it was selfish–I could feel his misery and relate and I’m sure there was more pain in his history than I could see. More than anything I’m surprised I have outlived him.

Anyway, I keep having dreams with Dan in them. In the dreams I am talking to him though I know he’s dead; I seem curious but not too phased by this. Sometimes within the dream there is another dream where I seriously question how I we are interacting. I don’t understand the finality of death; that’s what I take from this.

The other nightmares are also mostly psychological, typically having to do with people that at one point in time were important in my life, a couple different ex-girlfriends, some old coworkers and a few other people that had a special importance and have now vaporized. This is something natural, easy to understand but hard to accept for me. I’ve probably mentioned before I have no real roots, no family; there are few anchors in my life and that is part of why it is easy for me to just decide to buy a one-way ticket somewhere. I typically feel better about leaving than staying. Maybe I just haven’t found the right place or maybe the concept of stability is equated too much as stagnation for me; I might have trouble distinguishing. From this I get the loss and hopelessness.

There are some people with who I have little contact but feel inextricably connected to. Atoms that drift and collide but simultaneously in a quantum manner are also somewhere else, spaced across the earth. In these friendships I find relief but they often are unreliable and rotate in one-sidedness based on each participant’s relative state of despair. Somehow I’m usually content with the status of these relationships though I feel they could be more. Actually, our personalities are probably too violent for them to materialize into something consistent.

The past few months have been quite hard personally even though I keep putting myself in new and interesting situations to break out and also distract myself this chemical depression while also trying to work the situational part out. I haven’t experienced disruptive dreams for periods this long before. Sometimes I wake up and cannot get back to sleep for an hour (occasionally not at all) after one of the dreams. I try to pinpoint their origins and then I lie in bed trying not to think about them. I typically remember three dreams from each night. The pattern is very disturbing. I feel for the most part I can figure them out and should then be able to resolve and be done with them but it doesn’t seem to be happening that way. I have gotten better at letting go of things but still definitely isn’t my forte. I can’t tell if these dreams are helping or hindering the process.

Well, I hope you enjoyed reading this, abrupt ending and all. Glad I could brighten your day. Don’t Fear the Reaper just came on so I gotta go now.