It must be the Mocha Madness, the protein shake I drank tonight, last night, just hours ago, well 6 and a half hours ago after a particularly challenging spinning class with my favorite gay spin instructor, that is keeping me up… right? I mean, what else could it be? There is, of course, a bit of caffeine and chocolate — more caffeine — in the drink, not to mention skim milk… from a COW of all things, which we know by now will keep me, well, my stomach, a bit unsettled. Yeah, let’s blame it — this unsettling that is keeping me awake just hours before what I expect will be a long long day at work — on the Mocha Madness.

When I showered at the gym — my favorite part of the gym, actually — all I could think about was the Mocha Madness. In my mind, I wondered if my stomach could handle that terrible COW’s milk, but I needed some sort of protein within 45 minutes of my workout — they tell us this at the end of all the classes, you know — and by the time I finished my awesome shower — it really is a shame to enjoy showers away from home so much — I had only 10 minutes  before the 45 minutes so I had to drink my protein.

I get the Mocha Madness for 2 reasons: it tastes so amazingly good, and it has the fewest calories of any of the protein shakes and smoothies at the gym. I should have gotten… should haves are so useful right now as I enter the 2am hour… the Very Berry Blast, which has lots of different berries and orange juice, but alas, it was Mocha Madness that won my heart. I’m paying for right now, because I’m awake, despite laying my head on the pillow at 11pm, but I’ve been tossing and turning ever since. Whenever I toss like this, I end up writing. Maybe my muse is in the Mocha Madness.

Maybe I’m Mocha Madness, instead of my usual Sweet Caramel. I am absolutely not myself, I can assure you. My spirit has been quite unsettled for days, and it’s terribly uncomfortable. Saturday evening was the worse, really, most of Saturday, despite having a wonderful few hours with precious Matthew. I never get tired of hearing him tell me how much he loves me, or of his perfectly loving hugs. Hugs are really under-appreciated and under-utilized these days. I don’t really get them much and I don’t really have opportunity to give them much, and when I do give them, I feel myself hold on longer than I used to when hugs were in abundance.

I called one of my best friends on Saturday… Nikki… because I needed a hug, and I needed not to have to ask for it. She obliged, of course, because she knew from the first 5 seconds of the call that I was in dire need of a hug. That’s pretty amazing, really, that from 3000 miles and 3 time zones away, she could see my heart. She has known my heart and all of its incarnations for a long time, and she told me something about myself on Saturday, something about my heart, in general and in regards to a specific situation, and she’s is right. Maybe that’s what keeping me up, what she’s right about, what I only allude to in vague terms, what fills my mind, frightens me, even.

The truth is that I’m out on a limb, and I was comfortable on that limb once I actually got on the limb, and I had come to believe that the limb was strong enough to hold my weight (shut up!), but it seems like the weight or the limb is shifting almost without warning — why did I write “almost” — and it’s left me unsettled… unsettled, like I drank a Mocha Madness with caffeine and chocolate and COW’s milk, of all things.

I wish that I was just a little drowsy now, you know, but I’m not. I’m just unsettled. It started, now that I think about it, after I chose not to have a Mocha Madness on Friday. I’m more than a little confused, too, but I really can’t afford that right now. In 4 hours, I have to get up from a sleep that doesn’t seem to want to come, and bring donuts to the office for people who really don’t need them, and hope that the plan I wrote actually works out the way I planned it. Of course, planning isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s lots in my life that I didn’t plan, wouldn’t have planned or expected, but it happened anyway, good and bad stuff. I’m not planning for some things, anymore. I’ll put those things in God’s hands, where they belong, and maybe then I’ll be settled.