My house is full of stinging things. Wasps and hornets, poison ivy, ants wherever I turn. Through dinner I rub myself with nettles till my skin turns raw and red. I eat spiders for lunch and they bite me on the way down. I scratch and itch and shudder and twitch, but still with zeal I expose myself to irritants.
I have been trying to remove stressors from my life. I have been lopping them off like so many gangrenous limbs. But is it too late? The poison has got to my blood and it swirls around in my body. How did a stubbed toe turn into this?
One metaphor ran out of steam so I switched to another. The beautiful thing about blogging is that I can write poorly if I damn well want to.
16 April 2008
04 April 2008
April Is the Cruellest Month
Daytimes are all right once you're up and moving. There is the delight in daily things, in things you learn and foods you eat and people you see. Every few minutes brings a tiny surge of excitement that propels you forward, so that you jerk onwards through the day in spurts and sprints that flag only when you run out of novelties. Then you have nothing left to react to, nothing external that'll squat in the rooms of your mind. Instead your insidious thoughts ooze up through the floorboards and under the door.
This is evening. The energy has not yet run out but the happiness has. The fresh flow of delight is curdled by a growing awareness of your own faults. There is the agitation, the racing thoughts, the struggle to get through the evening intact. The daily fight of your body versus your mind. Sometimes your mind wins. Your body's best tactic is to go to sleep.
You wake to the hollow inertia of despair. You wake early because you slept early, having decided that sleep was less harmful than anything else you might do. You lie in bed in the morning for maybe one hour, maybe three. Sometimes you don't get up at all.
You never do anything much because you are never calm enough for thinking. Even your daytime excitement is a crazed sort of agitation that you can barely control. You wonder, in those despairing morning hours, whether there's anything you can do to fix this. You think not. How can you eliminate turmoil when everything in the world is a trigger?
This is evening. The energy has not yet run out but the happiness has. The fresh flow of delight is curdled by a growing awareness of your own faults. There is the agitation, the racing thoughts, the struggle to get through the evening intact. The daily fight of your body versus your mind. Sometimes your mind wins. Your body's best tactic is to go to sleep.
You wake to the hollow inertia of despair. You wake early because you slept early, having decided that sleep was less harmful than anything else you might do. You lie in bed in the morning for maybe one hour, maybe three. Sometimes you don't get up at all.
You never do anything much because you are never calm enough for thinking. Even your daytime excitement is a crazed sort of agitation that you can barely control. You wonder, in those despairing morning hours, whether there's anything you can do to fix this. You think not. How can you eliminate turmoil when everything in the world is a trigger?
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