If I have but one talent, it is running decent things into the ground until every drop of goodness have been squeezed out of them. It’s a talent and I’ve always had it and I don’t suspect I’ll ever really get tired of flexing it. If brobelfish.com doesn’t get up and running soon, I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself.
I spent the day near windows, feeling the breeze and contemplating every molecule of my existence until nothing made any sense anymore and then suddenly I was eating half a barbecue sandwich and telling poor Dave about my latest family breakdown. Things are not great, they’re never great anymore, but sometimes they are manageable and right now they are only manageable because I am not the one doing the managing. I am the one who got away. I am the one nobody keeps clued in because she has a different area code from everyone else. Because she doesn’t need the stress, supposedly. Because what would she do with the burden of family reality?
But I am also one who wants to fix it, and I am one who feels utterly helpless. And clueless. And useless.
And I know things aren’t meant to get any easier, so I need to figure out how to navigate this frothing river before my shitty little kayak overturns and I’m left trying to recall how to swim, since I haven’t had to so in so, so long.
I’m reading a book right now that throbs with the beauty of mundanity and the constant ache of life itself. I am watching my boy cat cuddle up with my camera and lick it in places it never knew it wanted to be licked. I am listening to planes taxi overhead. I am smelling the remnants of the skankiest of rotel mixes in my slow cooker. I am remembering how it felt to be me this time last year and how much I have improved, traded up since then. I am feeling my lower back pulse with a dull pain that has yet to be pinpointed. I am trying to make sense of the fact that this year is very nearly a quarter of the way over. I am thinking about dentist appointments and gym visits and self-discipline. Demands and love and mulligans and confusion.
Spring always opens a well inside me. I never feel particularly prepared for it, even though I long for it all year.
your last 2 sentences pretty much sum up the way i feel every year around this time. great post.