Sleepless nights

Lying in bed alone late at night is usually when I feel the worst about myself. It's then that, in the absence of the light, my emptiness is the most glaring.

I'm free-floating through life. I feel untethered. It's an uneasy feeling -- feeling untethered.

Maybe it's your relationships to others that are supposed to ground you. But none of my relationships seem substantial enough to keep me on the ground.

And no matter what, I feel like something is missing from my life.

I go after my dreams, no matter how crazy, full-force but when my dreams remain unattainable -- despite all of my efforts -- I feel a haunting moldiness inside.

Life, I believe, is the pursuit of perfection -- or your idea of it. And this is probably why one rarely ever feels satisfied with themselves. Because the minute one feels fully satisfied -- like nothing is missing -- would be the moment that life ended if my theory is correct.

So why is it so hard to accept a missing piece of the puzzle? I guess, again if my theory is correct, that if you could be OK with a missing piece, that's the same as being fully realized and happy and then your life would end.

This rationalization, even if completely false, should give me peace. But no matter what, I lie alone in bed at night, listening to Gavin DeGraw or Hanson and feeling sorry that for one thing, there's no boy to sing sweet things to me.

But then I wake up in the morning, and when I consider telling a cute boy I see that I in fact think he's adorable and would he like to get to know me, I sigh and give up. The effort just seems so great sometimes.

I mean, who's to say some random boy would even like me? I'm tired of risking it. I'm always taking the risk. And hardly ever getting a reward.

Beyond that, I like being single so why do I feel like a big piece of me is missing without a boyfriend?

I guess because nobody would really stay single if they didn't have to.

But that could be a lie because I know someone who would go out with me in a minute if I asked but I don't want him -- at least not anymore.

What also keeps me up at night is my future.

It's like the passage in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar where she writes that her life is a fig tree, with each of her possible futures hanging on the end of each branch, ripe and ready for her, but she can't choose.

"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet," Plath wrote.

I feel like I can't even see my figs. I can't see them so how do I know which one to choose?

I find it all overwhelming. I really just want some sleep.

(The above image is of Michele Pfeiffer in Witches of Eastwick.)