Free

I have not stopped coughing for days, roughly 8 days. It wakes me up from a dead sleep at 5:00 a.m. I am losing my mind. I've been taking Buckley's before bed, and yes it tastes awful and it works. Until it stops working and I jolt awake to a hacking cough that sounds as though it belongs to a 70-year-old smoker.

I'm supposed to see a movie tonight, but I'm afraid my cough will strike and I'll annoy people and have to leave. I've been dousing myself with remedies to bring on the cough so I can get it over with already, but it drags on and on.

The week has also been spent feeling very introspective. I'm almost always a reflective person. The Dude catches me staring into space, deep in thought, and usually has poor enough judgement to snap me out of it to ask what I'm thinking about, to which I never give him a good answer. But with my alone time I've been really digging into some old memories that pop up. But not really memories, more like old feelings associated with the past.

I've thought a lot about my childhood. And while I think I had a reasonably good one, suddenly and abrasively I'm grateful it's over. I've thought about my teen years, which had its moments, but was mostly a painful and anxious time for me, and I remember the sense of dread I walked around with almost all the time. And it's weird because I'd forgotten about it, I'd forgotten the real way it felt. I intellectually know I hated high school and felt trapped there, but the actual feelings were long gone and I couldn't feel them again.

And then suddenly there they were. A sense of isolation, feeling misunderstood, mild despair and frequent self-loathing. And childhood was confusing and lonely. I always felt trapped. I needed so much alone time, which I was rarely given, and yet when I needed companionship I often didn't have any, courtesy of being someone who liked being by myself.

So here I am, at my desk during work hours, and I'm suddenly hit by a wave of feelings I'd forgotten about, and then all sorts of gratitude it was no longer something I was feeling. And this all happened the week after I got married. I think I experienced the emotional residue of a major life milestone. Like an aftertaste of past experiences that are officially over.

It's weird. My day to day life is the same. I'm the same person and my relationship is unchanged. But there's something in the air, a sense that the future is now more important than the past. I've always looked to the past. That's what being a reflective person is like. You always look backwards to try and understand where you've been. Now I'm looking forward and now that those random waves of past emotions have stopped coming over me, I feel really done with them.

Nothing in my life has changed, except the way I think, which actually might be an incredibly large change, and a good one. I'm excited to think about the future, I mean, to really think about it. And I feel free.