On Time

Well, yesterday I blathered on for quite some time about St. Louis in January and the New Congress. Luckily, I wasn't particularly enamored with my post. Blogger ate it. Good bye, post. We hardly new ye'.

Anyway.

Mercifully, this January in St. Louis has lacked the bone-snapping cold so common to the after-holidays in our region. The weather? Gray and dreary—it’s like someone ordered it special just for me. It’s the perfect background for my aggressive moping. This is the time of year when the weather and the post-holiday letdown usually leave me unmotivated and depressed. Lately, I’ve just been unmotivated and depressed generally, the holidays were just the final dollop of yummy whipped misery.

So, the interminable gray of midwinter is upon us. I feel slothful and dull, as though I’m encountering the world at its maximum viscosity. I am trying to find things, many things, anythings, to do to fill the stack of hours between waking up and sleeping, that time between my alarm clock and the witching hour when it becomes reasonable (rather than pathetic and weird) to go to bed. Time is like a nest of baby birds, and I am constantly looking for bits to drop into the twitching, gaping mouths.

So I walk the dog. I watch absolutely terrible reality television and feel superior to the people I’m watching. I eat popcorn and chocolate to excess. I write. I read. I drink too much.

When I was divorcing, there was about a three week period when I still lived in Florida in the house I then shared with my not-yet-ex-husband. I had set myself up in the guest room and I spent all my non-working hours in there, emerging only to forage for food, to check my e-mail in my adjacent office, or to use the bathroom.

I was trying to avoid the Ex, any encounter was more likely than not to turn into a screaming fight—I recall on one memorable occasion looking around for something close to hand with which to brain him—but I was also trying to disengage from that life, from all the things I was walking away from. The house I was leaving. The state I was leaving. The perfect job I was leaving. The dog I was leaving. The marriage I was leaving. The only social interaction available to me was long-distance calls to friends and family who were hours and hours away, and who, despite their considerable efforts, could only do so much to help while away the time. Of which there was so. Damn. Much.

Time felt like it had stopped. Broken. Like some unfeeling fuckwad who just hated me had monkeywrenched the entire operation of the universe to trap me forever in that guest room. That was lilac. With pink carpet. And in Florida. There were times when I almost could not remember what it was like to have a life that did not consist of sitting on the floor in a room watching t.v. and waiting to go to bed.

Finally, though, the three weeks ended and I moved out. I returned to St. Louis and commenced wild experimentation in new ways to ball up my adulthood.

And right now, I’m sitting at my desk, and reminding myself that time does pass. Eventually.