Winter

I haven’t written in so long because I wanted to be able to give you some kind of glowingly positive essay about how much I have changed and how commitment to changing changes everything. 

But it doesn’t.

I haven’t.

I find myself… still myself.

I stay up way too late, searching the night for answers.

I can see the horizon, hear the audience screaming, yet I perform the same routines day after day never taking enough steps forward to change my mental zip code.

I have had a few realizations though. 

I stay here in this routine waiting for someone to need me.

A good soldier at the ready to jump into action.

A mother’s curse.

I still believe everyone’s feelings are more important than my own.

I am still waiting for “the call” the thing that announces that it’s time to do something different.  I mean a literal call.  Not a “calling.” 

I’m a butterfly curled up in a cocoon that is long expired.  My hair is going gray, my limbs still lithe and healthy, my dreams as big as they ever were… yet I wait.  Here in this warm house, in my same ugly sweats listening to too much Glen Hansard because his poetry is a river and I am a mere stick in the current.  My heart flutters when he hauls off and belts…”Cuz this is what you’ve waited for, your chance to even up the score and as these shadows fall on me now I’ll win somehow, yea, cuz I’m pickin’ up a message lord, that I’m closer than I’ve ever been before. So if you have something to say, say it to me now…  just say it to me now.”

I’m waiting for a door to close instead of looking for an opening.

My son told me that winter is a time of rest for all of nature.  The trees can’t live if they don’t have this time to conserve energy and resources and sleep.  He said that when their leaves start draining of color it’s because they are sending all of their food and energy down into the trunk to sustain them through the winter.  Their leaves fall so that they don’t freeze and pull on the branches. 

I looked at the trees as we drove along, bare of leaves, stark and monochrome, unnoticeable unless one stops to look. 

What do I need to drop to conserve my energy?

I’ve stayed up too late again tonight, even though sleep is the only thing I actually feel really good about.  I love it when I wake up in the night and go to the bathroom then crawl back in bed knowing I will fall right back to sleep…not knowing how much time is left in the night.  My brain too tired to stay awake, no battle to fall back asleep.

I wake up to a single wave of nausea.  Another day that I don’t really give a shit about, yet I know it is a gift.

I have a quote printed out and hanging on the wall in my bedroom…

“It hurts to become.” – Andrea Gibson

Perhaps this is becoming.