Sleeping is Giving In (Mage)

Dear Diary,

I've decided to dispense with the fiction that I'm talking to anyone other than myself. If I'm going crazy anyway, I'm not going to sweat the minor detail of pretending that this is of interest or concern to anyone else, but... honestly, this shit is affecting my work. And I've got to think that's bad, because it's not like this job really requires much in the way of brainpower or even really paying attention. Hell, I've been smiling and pretending everything is just... swell for as long as I can remember, so it's almost second nature by now. Or you'd think so.

The last thing she said to me as I left for school that day was, "Be careful." Maybe I took it a little too much to heart. Maybe I think too much. He always said, "Idle hands are the Devil's playground," and with the smile I always thought it was another homily for the straying members of the flock. But he could have been serious, and maybe the problem isn't the idle hands, but the active mind that tends to start spinning its wheels when it isn't focused on the hands.

After she left... Matt became a caricature of himself. He lettered in three sports, maintained a respectable B average, became one of the high-school elite. He got into trouble, but it was appropriate trouble, like cruising around with his football buddies and knocking over mailboxes, or stealing a chunk of sodium from the chemistry lab and dropping it into one of the toilets in the boys' washroom. Boys-will-be-boys sort of shit. We barely spoke, and when we did it was about trivial things - small talk and gossip.

Dad just started acting... freaky. Like, he didn't get upset or seem to miss her, but sometimes I'd see him in his car after I got off school, watching me and my friends when we were at the mall or hanging around Starbucks. At home it would be this bizarre Norman Rockwell scene for a couple of hours, but late at night I'd come downstairs for a snack if I was studying for a test and he'd be standing in the kitchen with the lights off, staring out the window at something in the yard. And his sermons at church started to get really weird - he'd talk about angels hunting down sinners and evildoers. He started getting obsessed with witches and "devil worshippers", and he got arrested for getting out of his car at a red light one time and beating the hell out of some poor clueless yuppie walking down the sidewalk because he said he could see "the mark of the Iron Tower" on him.