I repeat myself a lot. With my words. With my thoughts. With this journal.

I usually realize that I'm repeating myself when I'm about half through repeating myself. And, I figure, as long as I'm that far along, I may as well push on through and get it over with.

Anyway.

I want something. Maybe even need something.

There's this nagging emptiness following me around everywhere I go. I can't seem to escape it, except sometimes when I sleep and my dreams take me somewhere else. Some place where none of this matters. And where the emptiness can't find me.

I don't know what I want. I don't know if I want it or need it. Most disturbingly, I don't even know what it is.

That up there - that's a fine example of me repeating myself. For more examples, see almost every entry I've done for the past year and a half.

Anyway.

That's what I miss, maybe most of all or at least in the top five things I miss. That sense of knowing exactly what I needed and knowing that I absolutely needed it. My life may have been replete with confusion and doubt but, by fuck, there was always that one thing that I knew beyond any shadow of any inkling of any doubt.

Now?

Not so much.

To repeat myself again, I miss me. It's been a long time since I've seen myself, talked to myself, commiserated with myself.

It's been so long, in fact, that I'm not even sure that I'd recognize myself.

I wrote back in February 2005:

I'm more than a little ashamed of what happened to me, and more than a little sorry for feelings I've hurt and concern I've caused, but more than that, I'm amazed at how quickly the person I was evaporated. I'd have never believed that anything could affect me so strongly. Could essentially erase everything I was and turn me into this amorphous thing I see when I look into the mirror.

I'm still looking in that mirror. Looking for some clue as to who I might be.

And I'm still repeating myself.