Some days the wind blowing over a meadow and making all of the purple ends of the long green grasses billow and dance in waves is enough to make up for sitting in an office for eight hours. Especially when a deer jumps suddenly across your path going full tilt and the other three people on the path don't even bat an eye and you wonder if it actually happened. Maybe it just happened for you, in your reality. In theirs, there was no deer.
I'm definitely in a surreal kind of mood lately, somewhat nostalgic, somewhat blue, somewhat outright depressed. Melancholy. I was going to rant about something, but face it, I'm not really good at it. Maybe it's the weather. Spring on campus always reminds me of my first spring on campus, my first taste of love. And then another spring of burgeoning sexual experimentation. And then one more spring, of realizing I was done experimenting and was actually quite happy with monogamy, but thanks for the offers anyway. The kids I see around campus are young and fresh and oblivious, and I feel old. So far removed from that mindset, yet so able to vividly remember it.
I worry that I spend more time looking at the insides of my eyelids than at the rest of world. What if the secret to happiness isn't inside my own head? What if self-knowledge is overrated? What if I passed that point of useful introspection a long long time ago? I have an acute case of Hamlet Syndrome, all my life being lived in my head, none of it acted out. I've always been like this, at least as far as I can remember, which is pretty far. Hours of lying on my bed, memorizing the cracks in the ceiling.
Since the wedding, I go back and forth between weird states of emotionality. Actually, since just before the wedding. It's been about a year since what I have termed my Mental Breakdown, since it seems a hard thing to define, and I like those words. Every few months I discover something "new" about my life or my brain or my past and suddenly it turns my world view upside down. And I've realized this actually seems to happen every few years... Life is going along fine and dandy for a while and I feel like I've got a grip on things, and then bam! Out of left field I realize something and feel like my whole world view has been thrown off kilter. Sometimes it's a good thing, a moment of cosmic "Duh!" where I realize that X is X and that it's ok and good. Sometimes it's worse.
This time it's especially weird. Or maybe it's not, and it's just me being me, as usual. Maybe it's finding out that it's my ten-year high school reunion secondhand and still not being invited weeks later. Maybe it's a feeling of having accomplished very little. Maybe it's just spring.
"Come to me my melancholy baby
Cuddle up and don't be blue
All your fears are foolish fancy, maybe
You know, dear, that I'm in love with you;
Every cloud must have a silver lining
Wait until the sun shines through
So smile, my honey dear,
While I kiss away each tear
Or else I shall be melancholy too..."
Thanks, Ella.