I’m in a mood lately.
I’m in a mood lately where so many amazing, fantastic, mind-blowing things are going on around me and doors are opening faster than I can run through them, yet I find myself sitting in a corner licking my wounds and analyzing obsessively the very few things that aren’t working in my life.
Some of my sadness comes from good things, like change and opportunity and facing my fears. Some of it comes from missing things and missing people so much that my heart aches and pains as though it were literally broken.
I’m in a mood where I crave and yearn and long desperately for a feeling. A feeling I can’t exactly pinpoint but it calls to me. It calls to me and I want to crawl up inside it and ingest it. Even without knowing what it is.
Like when you crave iron so bad you eat a whole head of broccoli and six bags of spinach or a 6 pound raw steak.
Or when you need calcium so much that you find yourself chugging ice cream and gnawing on the intact bones of your friends.
Or worse, you miss vitamin C so intensely that you suddenly find yourself drinking 2 litres of Orange juice all to yourself. WITHOUT Champagne or Vodka in it.
I have this intense craving. Only it’s not about food or vitamins.
Its not about nourishing my body.
It’s about my soul.
Lately I feel fragile and emotionally vulnerable and it makes me crave comfy cozy things like scotch, books and radio shows and the smell of cherry pipe tobacco.
I can’t bring myself to turn off CBC radio because I’m worried I’ll miss something I can’t live without hearing. In fact I leave it on even when I’m out of the house… for the cats, in case they too have souls that need nourishing.
My children, naturally, turn it off the minute I walk out the door because they are evil compassion-less monsters without souls but the cats haven’t started crying at the radio yet so I trust they are being sufficiently satiated by whatever exposure they do have when I’m here.
Speaking of crying.
I’ve been crying lately.
It’s my new thing.
I cry. Alone. In the dark. When nobody is looking.
Or when surrounded by strangers. In the middle of a crowded street or supermarket. In broad daylight.
That happens too.
Yesterday I was feeling a little weepy, and to take the sting off, and prevent any public outbursts, I went up the street to Encore and bought a box set of Gerald Durrell books. They didn’t have my favourite (they never do) My Family And Other Animals, and I was disappointed so I was forced to buy a David Sedaris book too, for good measure.
Last night I lay on the sofa toe to toe with Thing 1. She sipping a cold beer (At first I accidentally wrote bear and when I realized it, took a moment to be thoroughly amused with myself and the image of my daughter sipping on a cold bear. I considered leaving it but somebody was sure to comment and correct me which would have taken all the fun out of it so now she’s just sipping on a regular cold beer. You needed to know all of that. ) and reading Birds Beasts and Family, and I with a glass of Rosé in one hand and Menagerie Manor in the other. I read until my eyes called it a night and I couldn’t possibly read one more word.
And it felt so good. It felt like food. Food for the soul. Actually.
This morning my friend Peter called to tell me that David Sedaris was being interviewed on the radio. I don’t even have the words. I turned up the volume and sat on the kitchen floor with my coffee and the army sugar ants that parade back and forth from my kitchen sink to the back door.
I’m not starving anymore but I’m not full. I realized this weekend that there has been something missing from my life for many years now and its time to start putting some of it back.
Which is precisely what I intend to do.