"It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams and have you any dreams you'd like to sell?"

I've found a new job. Exactly one week after I left the other job, I was hired on elsewhere. It's only part-time and the pay is only minimum wage, but at least it's a job that wont cause me to lose sleep at night. I'm far too anxious. About anything and everything, really.

Even my dreams belie anxieties. These anxieties, though, are not a distillation of my waking neuroses. No, my dreams seem to harp on relationship-oriented anxieties. In my dreams, I am the romantic comedy's perennial best friend. I am the sidekick, the single one. The dreams in which I play this part are quickly becoming the adult equivalent to that childhood nightmare in which I'm in the driver's seat of my family's Mercury Marquis as it wildly careens down the one-way streets downtown, my feet unable to reach the pedals and my eyes barely able to see over the dashboard. Recurring dreams. Unsettling dreams.

And--at least as far as these new dreams are concerned--there's really no reason for them to be so troubling.

My waking mind reasons that everything happens--if it is to happen at all--in good time. I know I don't have to be in a relationship; I am self-sufficient, independent. I do not need anyone to "complete" me--I am perfectly fine on my own.

But at the same time, I want to be in a relationship again. I'm ready. Not to settle down or anything, but to join dance. I want to dance--or at least the chance to.

Maybe it's the thought of never getting another chance that so upsets me?

I have never liked closed doors. I've always needed potentiality, opportunity. Otherwise I feel trapped. Panicked. Anxious.