We live in four dimensions, right? Up/down; left/right; forward/backward; and then the one that doesn’t fit in so well, time. And they’re all related, says Einstein — space/time continuum and all that. Wormholes and gravity affecting the passage of time.

I think.

Actually, I really hope so, because otherwise the following train of thought transforms from nifty abstract conceptualization into just another sign that I should never have experimented with drugs.

I’m watching as everyone around me is moving somewhere. Mostly forward; some parallel; a few backward, maybe, and quite possibly one might be moving up or down. Plans are made and set in motion. Things are accomplished. Life is lived and goals are achieved, or at least approached.

And today, just like many days over the past year or so, I feel very detached from that. It’s not even a case of running to stand still; it’s more like being a bug trapped in amber.

Talking with Trix the other day about fears, and I remembered one that I don’t usually think about — I guess it’s not really a fear, but a situation guaranteed to induce anxiety and panic. I can’t stand being bound — not handcuffed, but losing mobility in my arms or legs. I’m not really claustrophobic in the classic sense, afraid of small areas or tunnels or caves, but on a very extreme level I am. The idea of being encased in concrete, waking up in a morgue drawer, or even being tied to a chair with enough rope that I can’t move my arms or legs — these are thoughts that can make me break out in a cold sweat if I give them enough time. And one more for that list: being frozen in amber.

But this day isn’t about not being to move. I had an “Aha!” moment earlier in the day, when the lack of change in my life first hit me, and called this temporal claustophobia. But that’s not really right, is it? If I’m being a stickler, that would really be more a sense of having too much to do and too little time — being bound by the hands of the clock, as it were. More accurately, this is temporal agoraphobia. I’m looking around me and there’s nothing but open time, for as far as the eye can see, and I’m frozen, unable to move, panicked and shut down.

2006 has been a year filled with false starts for me so far, a lot of promising beginnings and quick, sudden endings. That doesn’t really bother me — if nothing else, the false starts help me keep the bipolar shit at bay, tucked neatly in the back of my head. But what does bother me is that I’m starting to second-guess everything now, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve always said that I’m a cynical optimist: I hope for the best but expect the worst. Self-fulfilling prophecy, without the prophecy part; say you’re something long enough, and you become that. Stare long enough into the abyss, and the abyss stares back into you?

Okay, that’s just ridiculous (he says, totally aware of all the other shit that he thinks but doesn’t call himself on…). But maybe fair enough, in a sense.

I know that this feeling falls back to a lot of the thoughts that I was having last summer, when I had a really bad attack of hopelessness (not in a suicidal depressive sense, but a “life is meaningless” philosophical sense). I wonder what the whole point of all this is. And, again, to repeat and reinforce myself, I’m okay with that. I’m even okay with the idea that there is no point to all of this, that it’s what you see is what you get and we might as well enjoy all we can since it ends definitively at some point.

What’s bothering me, standing in this open field of ticking clocks, is that I’m not really doing anything to move in any direction. Not forward, left, up, or even backwards. I’m just sitting still — partly because as much as I crave change, leaving the familiarity I’ve constructed scares the shit out of me, and partly because I just don’t know which way I should be going. Nothing’s really calling me in any direction right now, and wandering got old a long time ago.

It’s not that I don’t want to grow up; I just wish I could figure out what I want to be before I start.