Lack

Anyone who knows me slightly well can tell you that I prefer to spend more time in the fantasy land in my head than I do in reality. Maybe I read too many books as a child, who knows. All I know is that it's pretty much always been this way. Usually it works well as a distraction from things I don't like, or when my life gets particularly uninteresting. Sometimes I use it to distract myself from something I want that I can't have immediately, something I've never been able to deal particularly well with. Or I can convince myself, for a short period of time that I actually have the thing that I want so desperately. Sometimes it has the unfortunate side effect of illuminating desires that I've managed to hide from myself. And once realizing that I'm missing something, that empty space is never unnoticeable again.

And sometimes, strangest of all for me, real things appear in life that surprise me. Things I didn't know I needed, feelings I didn't know I had, sometimes things that were right in front of me all along and I just never looked at them in quite that way. Suddenly things change. So when those things disappear I notice empty spaces.

Sometimes it feels like an itch I can't quite locate the source of. Irritating, yes, but not intolerable. Sometimes it's something that comes and goes so fast that I notice only that it's disappeared, but can't remember what was lost. Sometimes it is all encompassing, it takes over my waking and dreaming life. It's the worst kind of distraction. The kind that keeps me from focusing on anything else. If I could just fill that space everything would be OK, but I can't and it's all I can think about. It scatters my already scattered thoughts, makes regular life impossible, and makes fantasy land frustrating because it's that much harder to exist in reality.

And I wonder...

Was it better not having any knowledge of those blank spots? Would they even exist if things hadn't changed? Would it be better that way? Or would they be desires that popped up while dreaming one day? Possibly in a different form or possibly dismissible as the randomness of my imagination, since things wouldn't have changed and it would have seemed like such a bizarre idea. (Though still leaving a sense of emptiness.) Above all, I wonder, if I could have access to the things I want immediately, and consistently, would I want them as much? Or would I get bored with them quickly, like I do most everything else, and go back to consoling myself with fantasy land? And then what new thing would I notice that I'm lacking?