I no longer know who I am and I feel like the ghost of a total stranger

it was three in the morning and I still couldn't sleep.  I know, I know, it's a Saturday night why do I want to be asleep.  Why was I trying?  Well I had no where to go.  Jessica and Parker had some boys over, Leslie went out with some girl and I well, I just got home from work and needed to relax a little and eat some dinner and basically there was just nothing for me to do.  I guess I could have went somewhere but I really had no plans and no one to do anything with so I thought maybe some rest would do me good.  My legs and arms are still killing me from Friday night.  What the HELL did I do?

So I was trying to sleep.  But I just wasn't tired and so at three in the morning I decided I needed to go out and have a cigarette.  I pulled a chair up to the kitchen window and leaned far out.  The sky was very overcast and heavy with fog that hadn't dropped low enough to really be fog.  The cities lights reflected off of it this orangy yellow glow.  Everything was bright.  It was like having a dim light on everywhere.  I listened to the sounds of the city, the cars driving and the honking and I thought of how quiet it was.  But this was my kind of quiet.  City quiet.  I have a harder time sleeping in places that are really quiet.  I need the lull of noise to rock me to sleep.  The sounds of sirens in the distance, of loud cars driving by shaking the windows, of honking and of people being too loud too late at night.  I listened and I thought to myself that this moment was now gone forever.  A moment I would never relive.  I inhaled deeply and watched as the smoke unfurled around my fingers and how it billowed out into the night sky as I exhaled.  I looked down and saw the kiddie pool and the huge balcony my neighbors below me were lucky enough to have.  I just had this window that I strattled and my tiny view of the downtown skyline.  So many wires in the way.  And before you could see the skyline you had to see the backs of all the houses.  Chaos and beauty. 

There were no stars.  Rarely can you see stars here.  I'm used to never really looking up anymore.  What would be the point.  I finished my cigarette and lit another.  I thought about who I was and why I am the way I am.  I wondered if I was trying too hard, or not hard enough and then I thought why in the hell do I even have to try in the first place, why can't I just be? Be enough for you and you and you?  Is there something I'm not doing or is it something that I am doing that keeps people away.  Am I that closed off, cold, ugly, wierd, mean?  I honestly don't know what it is.  I pondered over similar thoughts for a while and then I thought it was a pretty warm night.  It would be nice to have a balcony.  I'd sleep out there.  My downstairs neighbors have a hamock set up.  I wanted to scale down the building and lay in it.  Just then a light went on in the bathroom of the ground floor in the building next to mine.  I know it's a bathroom because I watch that window often.  Boys live there.  A boy that wears tighty whities.  I watched him wash his hands and stare in the mirror for a while and then he turned the light off and went away.  I am a voyeur.  I am also an exhibitionist, but not to the extremes.  I flirt with the idea of it.  I think I'm more of a voyeur though. I love to watch people when they don't know I'm watching, to see real life uninhibited. 

I finished the cigarette and decided I had exhausted myself with thought.  I went back to my room and crawled under the covers.