I'm leaving for England in 19 days, and I don't believe it. I don't know if I'll believe it until my feet are squeaking across dingy LAX floors, with my suitcase, far from packed, rolling neatly along behind me. Maybe not even then.
Work is grinding me down in ways I didn't know it could. I fall asleep tired and wake up exhausted. I suppose this is what it feels like to be a five day a week, 9 hour (or more) a day worker. I don't like it. It takes something from me that I can't afford to lose. It takes my belief that creativity and joy are vitally important, that kindnesses will be repaid, that smiling can fix things, that everyone does indeed have time to talk, to enjoy one another. I keep struggling, trying to remind myself that those things are truths worth holding onto. That that is my reality. All the more, though, it seems unimportant. Silliness loses its power in the face of exhaustion, loans, obligations. It all piles up and its all I can do to keep treading water, keep my head high enough to breathe. I hope, desperately, that this isn't reality. I want to deny it, refuse it! I want to fight for something else, even if its only the shadow of a poem, a moment with friends, sunshine. And yet, as my fingernails scrabble for a hold, something, inevitable as gravity, pulls me downward.