My thoughts have been running amok in recent months. I’ll find myself thinking about fantastical situations, even if they aren’t particularly appealing or interesting, and especially if they are kind of icky or even gruesome, and find myself barely able to control where they lead.
Say I’m on the train and my attention is drawn to some guy sitting a few seats down. Lately it’s been the tall, tan, almost blonde-ish fellows who are pulling me in, the ones with closely-shaved heads, lean, angular faces, and eyelashes I could swim in (I can’t tell if I’m into eyes or lashes these days). I’ll notice him and begin to wonder what his skin feels like, particularly his face, if I went up to him and put my hands on both cheeks, ran my thumbs over his eyebrows, licked his temples, smelled his neck, and if his lips would taste salty and full of sun. These imaginings feel perfectly normal to me, are undeniably entertaining, and quite harmless.
This does not bother me. In fact, it is one of my chief pleasures in life right now.
But lately, I’ve also been having thoughts of a more odious and/or ominous nature. I’ll see someone who I’m not attracted to, someone who might be the exact opposite of the above description, and I’ll run with it. Like, say there was a guy at work who was super nice, a little weird, and didn’t float my boat in the slightest. But a thought will pop up, like “what would it be like to…?” and even though I don’t want to think about where those dots lead, even though it doesn’t arouse, amuse or inspire me, I continue with the thought. I have to make a determined effort NOT to imagine smells and tastes and touches. I don’t want to but those little bastard thoughts are persistent.
Or I’ll be walking with Ryland along a bridge, a big drop down to the water below. And he’ll be riding my shoulders and I’ll wonder, “What if I just sort of let him fall over the side, down into the water? What would I do? What would the people around me do? Would he be okay? Would he drown? As soon as I let go, would I suddenly scream WHAT AM I DOING? Would I dive after him? Would I stand there and watch everything unfold, like a slow-motion movie scene? Would my heart beat any faster? What would everyone say to me later? Would they see I did it on purpose?” I force myself to stop picturing the details and the aftermath, and I feel a sickness in my stomach, at both the idea of that ever happening, by accident or design, and also at the idea that I could even consider such a thing, that it is a part of my conscious mind.
Yesterday, as I stood on the platform, watching as the train got closer, I saw myself suddenly jumping in front of it, and picturing the reaction of the crowd, and if everything in my bag would fly out, and if it would hurt right away or if I’d just pass out from it all before I really felt anything.
Are these weird thoughts? Does that make me a homicidal mother, or a suicidal commuter, or a sexually dysfunctional employee? Am I just bored and unchallenged in life right now? Do I not love my son? Do I hate myself? Do I really secretly want to make out with someone from work? Am I alone in these musings? Surely other people have similar wonderings.
I know the answers to these questions. Yes, in general, right now, I’m feeling bored and unchallenged, but not to any degree of seriousness; that’s kind of my inherent and general malaise in life. I love my son like I breathe, without thought, question or condition, but wholly essential to my continued existence. I do not hate myself; in fact maybe I like me a little too much. I harbor no secret crushes on anyone at work (or if I do, it definitely isn’t with the guy from above). I know that I’m not alone in thinking these things, or even in the extent of details. I just hope that my bedfellows are not of the bars-in-the-window variety.