evenings, mornings, afternoons
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, morning, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
I toss and turn in my sleep; if I don't make my bed every morning and tuck the far corners in, I find myself in a tangled coil of sheets and duvets in a matter of nights. There's something about it that I don't mind. I like the twist of it: a comfortable cocoon of blankets as opposed to a flat layer. I try to find forgiveness for my lack of bedmakingness within this enjoyment. Sometimes I wonder how much of life is just letting some things roll off your shoulders.
I get tangled in intangible things, too. Feelings, patterns, ideas, perceptions: old versions of self; lines I draw between my life and other peoples'; the paths between one moment and the next. You know, the usual. All of the time, I am unraveling layers and layers of life. It's like one big rubber-band ball, or a knotted skein of yarn, but it never ends. I can never find the center.
Something in the beginning of a new year makes me all the more aware of these messy, overlapping parts of myself. Most likely it's the sudden, glaring beam of unmet resolutions shining down upon me. Oh, hey, remember us? What the fuck happened, huh? I smother those thoughts as tenderly as I can manage, but the guilt is still there.
I get scared a lot, in a lot of odd & incomprehensible little ways. Often about things that really don't matter. If I think too much about what waits in the heart of all of the matters I need to pick apart, I go cold all over. I make a maze of myself and then refuse to move through it.
I moved recently. I'm changing positions at my job. Objectively good things - yet, I lie in bed at night and take deep breaths to ward off the chill of fear that touches me quietly on the sides of my neck. So, again: the forgiveness. I'm coming back to that, is what I'm saying. I get scared. I twist myself into knots. I try to look at them kindly; try to work around or through them.
Yesterday, I made hot tea and wiped down the sink. I ran a load of laundry and folded all of it while I listened to the same song on repeat. I watched House while I played Sudoku, then swapped to Teen Titans because all of the medical emergencies were making me want to pull up Web MD. I woke up early today and read for thirty minutes before I went to work. I read a Youtube comment that made me smile on my lunch break. Over Christmas, I painted a rock to look like Snoopy. The rock was perfectly shaped like his head. Fucking incredible. I feel happy, like I'm finding some measure of joy in the little things that I'd momentarily lost.
I wonder what I'll find next.
Good luck out there,
Eve