My mind has closed down since my return home. Last week I was racing through novels, exploring a new city, and thinking in the sort of narrative way that makes you want to write; it makes you want to share your thoughts with the world for them to read and consider.
What is it about home that closes me off from myself? I’m far too busy to write, far too tired to read. Smoke a bowl and all the aches and pains of the day disappear. And all thoughts are locked away beyond the reach of a carefully balanced mind, in danger of tilting off center at any moment.
Today was unbearably hot. I woke up with an all too familiar tightness in my chest. Work dragged by in a blurry haze. After work I dared venture out to the park for all of 45 minutes before the weight of the outside world became too heavy for my shoulders, and I returned home to the safety of bed.
Carol Cassella writes in Oxygen, “I wonder if it is more painful to be so acutely alert to the progressive failures of your body, whether it would be easier to lose cognition before corporeal function.” While she speaks of the delicate process of aging, I cannot help but relate to this statement in an entirely different manner.
I wish I was not alert. I wish I was unaware of the heaviness of my thoughts. I wish I, like many of the fairer sex, lived in blissful ignorance of my own sensibility. Being aware of the effects of my own mood raises within me a desperate need to control them, to keep things in balance, and to keep up my facade.
I wish for one day, just one, to be easy. I’m exhausted.
