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blurred lines

I don't tolerate opiates well. Or at least I've recently learned that I don't tolerate them. I was in a car accident on Monday and, while I don't want to get into the details, I've been on a mild painkiller since then. The last time I took an opiate was hydrocodeine for a cough. This time was Tramadol. Both, after about 24-36 hours of being on them, leave me with a strange transcendent feeling. It feels like everything internally is moving too quickly and everything external is moving too slowly.

At least no one need ever worry about me becoming addicted to heroin.

As terrible as these blurred lines between reality and perception are, for awhile (a very, very, very brief while) it's kinda entertaining. But that's in retrospect. At the time you can't realize how much you are floating between the two states. It's like when I'm falling asleep at night. One minute I'm asleep and the next I'm awake bemoaning my inability to fall asleep. I'd rather just be asleep though. Being between the two states is uncomfortable. It's the "not yet" of life.

The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter falls along the blurred line. In-between the tragedy of Friday and the celebration of Sunday. Uncomfortable. I never know how I'm supposed to act on that Saturday. Part of the problem is that I know how the story will resolve itself. Like falling asleep finally (anyone with chronic insomnia will attest to how wonderful falling asleep can be), Sunday comes as a relief. Good Friday is the agonizing time with your head on your pillow wishing that the agony of still being awake wasn't real. But there's always a transition. You can never move from awake to asleep without being somewhere in-between.

The more I think about it, the more I see that almost everything in my life is a blurred line. As much as we long to live in a clear-cut world, our lived are marked by the continual motion of moving from one state to another. I'm breathing out and breathing in. I'm thinking a word as I'm typing another. One foot is down as soon as another is up. I'm stopped but the world is still moving under me.

We're in perpetual altering.

So maybe that's my trouble with Holy Saturday. It's a day. It's the state that we exist in. Knowing how bad things have been, and how good things can be. We're moving into Easter and at an imperceptible point we cross over.

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