Improvements.

About a week ago, I decided to go on some kind of health kick. And here I am, a week later, looking really no different... but I feel pretty good, you know? It's nice not to wake up to an answering machine message in my brain from my body, saying "Right, you little bitch, the second your natural teenage metabolism crumbles, you are SO SCREWED."

So that's good.

Also I stopped biting my nails! Which is a major development for me. I do it every so often, but it usually fails. I am optimistic this time though.

In slightly less brilliant news I am having trouble sleeping, and unpleasant dreams. I know what they're about; I can relate them completely to the thoughts I am having whilst awake. I'm not worried about why they're happening, I know it's natural and common and all that other shit. But it's not helping. I think about it enough while I'm awake; I'd just like to be able to lay my head down on something soft, and close my eyes, and just for a while believe that I was somewhere where I don't have to worry about what happens when you die. Please. Is that so much to ask? I wouldn't have thought so, but who knows.
I'm sure it'll calm down, or at least, hopefully, get less vivid, harder to recall during the day, like most dreams.

I just wish - as anyone in this situation would - that this wasn't happening. In fact, possibly the worst dreams are the ones where it turns out to have been a mistake. And there are the tearful reunions and the soothing explanations and everything else. And then you wake up to a world that still has that hole in it. And you don't want to dwell on it but is it healthy not to? What do you do in this situation? Just grit your teeth through the days when your back just doesn't feel right, through the joint pains and the little niggles and aches, just try to let go and fall back asleep when you wake up at 2am for the third time in the night, sweating and shivering and aching all over? Just drag yourself out of bed through sheer force of will when you wake in the morning and have never felt more tired, when the sunlight streaming in through the curtains has never looked so cold, so clinical, despite the warmth you know in your logical mind is seeping through the room? Cold, all the time. Or too hot. Ravenously hungry or unable to look at food. And you're cheerful and happy through most of the day, and you can go to bed feeling perfectly fine, smiling and snuggling up to someone, but a couple of hours later you wake up and there's that tight feeling in your chest and that heat behind your eyes and you can't wake them up to tell them how you feel because you know the tight feeling will get tighter, shrinking until it becomes a little knot so tight and dense that it implodes into a little universe of worry and anger and fear, and you know that the heat behind your eyes will prickle and spread and before you know it you'll be there again, numb and silently crying and completely paralysed.

The last few nights have been hard. That's probably why I'm up so late. I don't want to go to sleep for fear of not being able to; for fear of the dreams I'll have.

They can hear me, but not see me. Or neither. And I suddenly see everything in my life that I'll never do - even things I don't want to do now. To never be able to fall in love, share a home with someone, get married, get a degree, hold your first child, buy your first house. To not be able to publish my book, be bridesmaid at my friends' weddings, be an aunt or godmother. To never be held by someone again, or kissed, or touched.

I don't know what I believe about the afterlife. Recent events have not encouraged me to make a decision regarding my beliefs or lack of. I just hope, in the mornings when I wake from these dreams and try to swallow the lump in my throat and anchor myself into a world where I am happy, that if there is something after this, it's not the way I dream it at the moment.

Apparently it takes a year for the body, let alone the mind, to recover from the death of a loved one.

If only it were as simple as not eating cheese before bedtime.