I walked home yesterday along the same street I always do, and while I was passing the same construction site that's been there for months I thought I felt myself drying up at the edges. I felt ready to be picked and blown away. Like scabs, like flowers. One thing has nothing to do with the other, except as an example of the strange parallels I construct and then straddle.
I'm not sad, except when I am. Right now I'm not sad. Right now I've got dinner in the oven and I'm hoping it doesn't dry out by the time my boyfriend gets home to eat it with me. I spent today trimming my hair and painting my toenails and grocery shopping and doing some other tiny things that will almost certainly be neglected when school starts again next week, until May. When I feel like I'm stretched too thin, when there are too many people and not enough me I try to think "This is where we are right now." (It's "we" because I think that way now, in terms of "we.") We are in the place where sometimes Diego just gets what's left over of Lindsay after this and that and the other thing. We're in the place of the stories we will tell our children about when we were first starting out. I don't love my job, but I love things about it and I love the relative freedoms it allows me for now. I don't always love the long walk to the train but I don't always mind it and I love my boheme apartment and I love love love the neighborhood I live in. Most importantly, I love the person with whom I'm sharing this little life I'm patching together. That he's strong enough to act on his feelings, that he's strong enough not to. That he responds to my fingers around his. So no, I'm not sad. Or I don't feel like I should be sad, maybe, is more accurate.
That's life, though. Ebb and flow. Fertile and fallow, happy and sad. I think it's interesting to look at what we mean when we say we're "sad," or what I mean. Lovely things spring out of sadness, songs and poems and paintings and books. It is so essential a part of life, this sadness thing, and yet when we are it - or at least, when I am it - I'm inclined to furrow. To hide it. What am I doing wrong that I'm sad? Something must be wrong in my life for me to feel anything besides happy.
Think about something else. Stay busy. Be productive, do better.
Think about something else. Close your eyes.
I want to only engage with the things in my life that make me happy and that are positive. I am fully aware that there are things I am actively avoiding, and that this avoidance has become such a part of my thought process and the way I interpret the world that I've forgotten how to be another way. It seems that I've reached a point where it's either unpack some of this stuff and work through it, or what I don't know. It's unpacking itself, at any rate - I can't do one thing without the buzzing of a thousand Other Things in the background. There is a news ticker at the bottom of the window in which I view the world, the window with the gauze curtain, and it never stops running and I can't see past it. Wanting to only see the good has made it impossible to enjoy what's in front of me, which is why I think this whole sadness thing is worth taking a closer look at. Perhaps I should sit with it a while, intentionally stick my hands right in and let it slide through my fingers. Really let myself learn what it feels like. Find out what's underneath it all.
See how I can use it.
