I’ve got three jobs now. I’ve presented an academic paper at a conference. I’ve been sick and gotten well again. I’ve made several runs to airports over half an hour away. I’ve spent more money than I had to repair my car. Again. It’s been a long three weeks. Or longer? I can’t really tell, except by going back to count days on the calendar which I haven’t done.
Fortunately it is spring break at the university I work for, which means I was afforded (mostly) this week off. I’ve had a few short tasks to see to, but nothing too elaborate. Today, Thor’s Day of break, I am finally starting to feel like I can relax and enjoy myself, which is unfortunate because I feel that could have used the past four days as well.
Any more it feels like it takes longer and longer to recover when an extended break comes around. Maybe I am feeling my age, finally (I did just turn 37). I don’t think I’m that old, but again, most of my life I’ve felt years younger than my biological age.
I am grateful for the days off that I’ve had, and will have yet to come before week’s end. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting or needing more. I’ve talked about it before, but the constant run run run run of modern life just isn’t sustainable. I certainly don’t have the mental reserves to keep it up. I need rest, and more and more frequently. I really don’t know how anyone does it for long. I haven’t felt like I’ve wanted it all to stop like I used to in before times, but then again, I haven’t had this much work to do for a while either.
Deep sigh.
I haven’t touched hobbies in a long time. I look at my work space and waves of despair wash over me, threatening to drown me in their dark embrace. I long for peace, and quiet, a simple life filled with simple pursuits. Damn this modern age’s will to dominate and to usurp and to exhaust all! Someone once said that once upon a long time ago we had the option to swim naked in clear pools and lie on fresh grass to dry and breathe clean air. But we humans invented religion and industry and that all changed. Maybe we never were that idyllistic as a species. I don’t know. I just long for an Edenic existence right now.
My mood is melancholy, obviously. And that is ok. It has been a gray day today and they say thunderstorms are on the way this evening. A perfectly wretched way to end a melancholy day. I’m here for it. This isn’t one of those posts that really goes anywhere or achieves a moment of zen at the end. It is one that expresses, vaguely, what my spirit can’t quite touch, imprisoned beneath bone and flesh.
Maybe what I long for is the freedom of my soul to wander the cosmos free of bond or need of oxygen. To flit across the motes of vacuum between galaxies and to ride on the waves of radiation beaming off of stars that my mortal eyes will never see, thrusting forth light across a darkness at once deeper than any I’ve seen in my mind and at once brighter than any terrestrial black. Once I wanted the forever sleep of eternal death, to assuage a lifetime’s weariness, and while that still appeals to me greatly, sometimes I think unending life unbound would be better still. To cast off bone and skin and weariness and finally untethered be. Either way, as beautiful as Earth still can be, I don’t know that I’ve really seen it enough lately to be firmly grounded anymore.
Maybe were I back in Virginia, gazing out across the sea crashing into the shore once upon a sunset, smelling the salt in the air, listening to the wistful cries of the gulls above and feeling sand between my bare toes, I wouldn’t be so disconnected from the life pulses of my terra madre. Or walking in a pine forest and seeing trees taller than buildings on a warm summer afternoon. Or swishing my legs through deep leaves on a cool Appalachian morning in autumn. Maybe what I long for is my birth home, where my bones feel surges of life in them again. I don’t know why I am so connected to that place, having now lived away from it longer than I lived there, but I feel the call.
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
John Masefield
Whatever it is…eternal sleep, galactic freedom, or home, I think I need it soon. I feel myself cracking inside, breaking down, and starting to come apart. Stitched seams are wearing away and my life is leaking out, drop by drop. It’s pooling in the crevices and soaking through the skin, sweat to yield to gravity’s yanking force, falling to unforgiving pavement and disappearing in the abominable heat of the Texas sun.
Tears well and threaten to spill. I’ll wipe my eyes, sigh once more, and in a few minutes decide I’m fine and that I’ll be ok. I’ll lie at first, but then make it true, because it needs to be true by Monday when I return to work, and Tuesday after that, and Wednesday after that and…I can’t face any more after that’s right now. As the Good Book says “sufficient for a day is the evil thereof” and I’ve experienced enough evil to fill years and years. And today.
If I’m quiet, I can almost hear the ocean, but it is muffled, like in a shell held to my ear, and then I realize it is only the blood in my head, crashing against the shores in my skull.
Don’t worry. I’m fine.
I’m fine.
a simple man 