"stop, focus, tell me what i'm looking at"

 I don't know what happened this morning.

 

I can set the scene, full from the cream of wheat that Abundance makes that I probably shouldn't eat so much of, just off a solo bus ride, Light too sleepy to get up with me, my right foot aching from the distant early warning of recurrent plantar fasciitis, reading a Gladstone novel on my phone, listening to a K Flay song (she's replaced Alexander Hamilton as my soundtrack of choice), walking behind someone smoking, the scent of cut grass, that tiny early morning chill that smells like the leading edge of fall.

 

And emerging from the low droning sense-of-the-routine hum of my morning, I felt like dropping to my knees from the weight of despair, the desire not to be here, not be this. I've never been stabbed by anyone but myself, so I can't tell you it felt like that, but it felt like something drastic, something violent.

 

And of course, I didn't drop to my knees, I was in the middle of a goose-poop covered sidewalk, trying to balance my parasol and my cup of tea, I had to go to work.  And I stuffed it back down, mostly, I know it's a passing fancy, I know that I'll pick up all the complicated threads again, I'm here in the office now, with the aforementioned tea and my stack of paper, disliking my job, all this salary work about other people reminding me that I'm really not making that much.  And everywhere I look, it feels like everyone else has less of an ass-in-a-seat job, and instead something more about the amount of work or the quality of work they do, and I resent that.  But it's my own fucking fault I don't have one of my own, I was too broken, I am too fragile, I will always be too frangible.

 

I've always liked the similarity of the words brittle and bitter.  

 

I either want a sense of routine or adventure, but all I seem to be able to feel is terror or stagnation frosted with helplessness, real or imagined.  So it's both and neither, all at once.

 

I want to flay my schedule down to the bone and build it back up into something that finds me happier, leaves me happier, makes me happier.  I want to figure out why I'm not talking to anyone but Abundance, Delight and Light, figure out how to correct it.  Or realize the answer is social media, public or private channels, and that I don't know how to do that, don't know how to learn.  (that's some 301 level being-a-functional-person shit).  

I'm remembering the strangest things. amaretto sours at a goth club, the conviction that the utility van parked across the street from the apartment I lived in when I was 23 was actually watching me, the desk that I set a little bit on fire in my teens that I ended up giving to someone whose usename I've forgotten, that plotless story I tried to write about Lesson and the redhead, those strange bedsheet dresses from the costume shop.  I'm used to remembering lines of poetry, crises, betrayals, the tips of the icebergs, not this flotsam.  I suspect this memoir class is going to be a bit of a wild ride.

 

Sometimes I think I just need to abandon everything in the quest for a consistent bedtime.

 

I know where my time goes, though.  It goes to sitting on the couch, to etsy, to pinterest, to youtube videos about makeup or puppies, to jigsaw puzzles, to Starbound.  And when it's not going there, when I'm actually doing something, it's going to reading, cross-stitching, cleaning, to the gym, to my nephew.  And even then, I'm not doing enough of any of those things, I'm also not cooking enough, or putting my room together, or....

 

I'm surrounded by partners I love. I'm going to have a room of my own with furniture and everything.  Gabapentin might actually be made of magic. I know this mood passes, but my bones don't believe me.