An hour has slipped by and my body is getting heavier. I have felt like sleeping these past few days. I am a soft kind of tired now. Leonard is lying just behind my chair now, on the cold floor instead of his usual spot on the rug. When I am done writing, I will lie on the bed with the thin quilt my grandmother made when I was born. Leonard will lie on the floor in the bedroom, too, even though he usually jumps up when the dog-proof comforter is spread over the sheets. But he runs hot and though it isn’t even 18 degrees Celcius, he’s overheating easily. He won’t want to snuggle. Too warm. Yesterday on the walk, he cut me off after a half-hour and pulled toward home. Not even the rain helped.
I have a difficult time making terms with the weather these days – when the heat seems like a waste when the sky is so gray and so deceptive. The long-term forecast shows eight days of overcast skies and rain. It shouldn’t matter. I know that. And I know that the sunshine probably wouldn’t make me more energetic. It would probably just mean another nap. At first. But I believe that it would seep in and waken something within me. Something vital.
“Listen to your body”. My body is saying that fish oil is not a substitute for sunshine. That the best way to release two years of tension might not be to push through to something new. I don’t even know what the hell I am striving towards.
It is difficult to turn off panic mode, the “run in any other direction as fast as possible” mode. There is so much I need to sort through. Both in terms of objects and in terms of thoughts. I need to lift each item of clothing, fold it, and determine how to sort it. Each random tube of mascara, every compact with eye shadow. Cerulean blue? Keep it or toss it? Where did it even come from?
I need to take each memory and hold it up and disconnect it from the thrashing, toothy emotion. Where did it even come from? And what does one do with such beasts?
Maybe they are leaving me now, all on their own, as I run hill repeats, flow through yoga sequences, and nap. Maybe they are leaving me ragged. And maybe poems will seep from the wounds.
I wonder if I can convince myself that this overcast sky is the thin white sheet of a blanket fort keeping the sun off my nose. That this day is an early afternoon rest between running through the sprinklers. And that soon the world will smell like charcoal and beef, and the fireflies will rise from the grass like so many fairies. The sweet kind of fairies, with fistfuls of pixie dust.