These Days Where I’m Made of Glass
I’ve been feeling depleted lately. Depleted at the library, where my trip to England left me behind on several projects, and where there never seems to be enough time to catch up on said projects. Depleted at the laptop, where I feel like so far Book Two is just a collection of kissing scenes, connected by moments of drinking and self-recrimination. (So basically, my life.) Depleted at home, where I am an increasingly shitty mother who constantly wonders how any higher power could have possibly subjected innocent children to someone as ignorant and irritable as me.
In karate, we would say repetition into repletion. You do the forms over and over and over again, until they bore you. Then until you don’t even notice them as you do them. Then until you HATE THE VERY IDEA of doing them or of doing anything at all. And then until you go on the deck one day, and you do the form, and you feel refreshed. Until the form is like coffee. Until the form is like this thing that makes you a better martial artist and a better human.
The idea is that you just keep doing your form, no matter what, through the boredom, through the distaste and through all the depletion, until you break through to the point where it refreshes you.
But I’m not reaching that point right now. I’m doing the library form, doing the writing form, the mothering form, and I’m still in that place where it’s all just so much noise and flailing of limbs. So, sorry in advance. This isn’t the post where I tell you about some epiphany I had that made everything better. About a dream I dreamed or a vision I had or a song I heard, that somehow made these brittle, glass-like feelings coalesce and heal.
Instead, I’m going to remember a few moments from the last few days that have made me happy. And maybe not quite repleted. But close.
–reading Jane Eyre in my cold bedroom at night, a dim lamp in one corner and a quilt wrapped around my shoulders.
–sitting in a friend’s dining room, eating Amish peppernuts, our conversations zigging and zagging between theology, YA lit and work gossip.
–going to wake my daughter in the morning, and having her reach out a chunky arm and pull me down next to her. Instead of trying to rouse her, I just laid there in the November morning sun, my lips pressed against her baby-shampoo-scented hair, and we dozed together.
–writing until 2 am at Denny’s with Ashley Fuller, desperately trying to make it to a thousand words so we can go out and have a cigarette. (Ashley: I should have just taken up smoking in college. I would have been a much happier person. [Don’t smoke, kids.])
–screaming in Josh’s car as a spider attacked me, and then him screaming, and then me screaming because he was screaming, and then him screaming because I dented his console kicking the sh*t out of the spider.
—listening to this song in my car, doing the weird torso dance you do when you’re listening to an awesome song but a) are seated b) are buckled and c) are paranoid the other drivers around you are going to think you’ve overdosed on bath salts or something.
Anyway. In other news, Book Two is coming along. And I saw Skyfall. Which, really, is enough to make anyone’s day better.