It’s never a three handfuls of conditioner shower—well, until tonight. With every tug, I took the large-toothed comb to my knots. The snarls snarled back, and I, like a lion tamer, held the line. My thoughts were equally gnarly, filled with hard-hitting questions. As each knot loosened itself, so did I. My final answer: I could have handled that situation differently.
Do you, like me, take your toughest problems into the heat and soothing steam of the shower to work through?
Why didn’t I put the newly budding hydrangea pot under the house’s eave? I thought, looking at the skylight’s usual dark window that had turned white. Although I’m so over the slushy hail stuff, I will welcome this night’s fluffy blanket of snow. But still, will the new shoots handle it?
I slapped another coat of paint on the basement hallway. It felt so satisfying, taking the brush’s edge full of white paint along the mustard trim. Clean and accurate lines that, when later I went downstairs to get something, I was like, “Dang, this looks good.”
There’s a noticeable swirly sensation in my chest; it feels like anxiety, like being behind on tasks, like worry. I’m worried that I’m behind. I’m worried that things are going to get away from me, like a table of waters that spill, roll off the table, and whose glass break into a bunch of tiny pieces. I’m worried that I can never relax anymore, that I’m always just a toy whose winder is wound to the point it clicks and then won’t go. I sometimes feel like the weight of everything is too much, the people I care about whose lives I can never separate from. They are a part of me. And although I try to unzip myself, to just be me, I know they’re out there, like a strong wind’s reminder of its power. And although I love it most times, right now I’d rather not.
I love writing and how therapeutically therapeutic it is. I closed my laptop to watch an exciting Kraken play. But so much of me wanted to keep it closed, to tuck it next to my bed, and immerse myself fully under the covers. And yet it’s open, and I’ve whittled down what I initially wrote. Sentences that no longer felt true, got taken to the curb like our Wednesday’s trash night.
What day is your trash person come?
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 