Written with insomnia

Written with insomnia

Home. What is it ultimately?

Lately it’s become nothing more than a place where I eat dinner and go to a fitful sleep. Most of the time, I simply log on to the Internet because everybody else has taken the seats to the TVs. And here everybody is, wondering why I don’t watch TV or movies on DVD anymore.

Most of the time I’m around at home, my family vegetates in front of the boob tube, hardly listening to the mundane stuff I have to say. Goodness, my mom frequently leaves the TV on when she sleeps on the couch, relying on it to go to sleep, waking up the instant someone turns it off. She really must learn how to use the “sleep” function.

As much as I would like to deep-six the remote controls strewn around the house and roundhouse-kick the TVs just to get my folks to really listen to me, I know that’s not really going to help things. All they will care about is me getting home at the time I tell them. Besides, I suppose we have enough money to stuff our little home to the gills with TVs if all of them fizzled out at once…perhaps to the detriment of other things, but that’s beside the point.

At this point in time it’s a bygone wish to have my so-called family listen to me more often. I seem to be predisposed to listen to them more. The only times I get to really speak my mind are on holidays—and how often do those come along? Not frequently enough.

Home…is where my bed is.

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They say the whole point of marriage is to get someone to become a witness to the fact that you lived at all. To this someone, your every little move—such as singing in the rain or traveling the world—will mean something and be cherished. Even the best of friends just don’t have this bond because they’ve got their own lives to live…unless husband and wife are indeed the best of friends, of course.

Well, that’s certainly a tidy ideal. Unfortunately, husband and wife are also their own persons. It amazes me how people even get the nerve to decide to get married at all, when loving someone in the context of a simple romantic relationship can only be considered half an impulse. The impulse has to be reciprocated to lead to anything, and we know this very well if only by dint of the many, many, many movies and stories written about unrequited love.

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Bill Dare makes a point in his novel “Natural Selection” that it’s the simple-but-unique art of making someone laugh that can seal the deal between a girl and a boy. So by that explanation, I feel like I’m on shaky ground at the starting blocks. I don’t know anything at all about her.

I wonder if my affection is indeed unrequited. This is perhaps the first time I ever opted to take a good look at someone who is the antithesis of what I find attractive in a girl. I wonder if it’s ever going to work.