Winter

Never-ending winter. The snow is beautiful and cold. Far too cold to enjoy. I have no warmth of my own. Too much time until spring takes hold. I want it to be here now. I need it to be here now.

To rid myself of the chill that's crawled under my skin and made it's home in my bones.

But will the sun even help? Every year I pray for winter to end. I believe that when spring comes, glorious spring, I will be changed somehow. I will shed the winter skin and become something new and better, with warmth of its own. With no need for artificial heat.

And spring has never failed to come. But I peak my head out for the first day of sun and warmth, only to shrink back inside myself, wishing I could enjoy the newness of it all. But I can't. Spring reminds me of what I'm not. Inspiring and optimistic. Full of hope. Of potential.

All four seasons are soaked in a despair that I cannot shake. Winter is death. Spring is hopeless. Summer is suffocating. And autumn, autumn is anticipation of the darkness to come.

I want to rid myself of the chill that's made it's home inside me. But I fear it is here to stay.

Still my longing for spring continues.

Transformative Thunder

The weather seems bi-polar this year. It will go from being extremely hot and humid to a rain storm in the same day, at least a couple of times a week. Today, it is thunderstorm weather, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to let up. I wonder if that is why I keep dreaming of tornadoes. I do like waking up to the sound of the rain pounding on the rooftop, and the sound of thunder rolling in as if from a whole other universe. Like it’s going to bring with it something new and amazing - something out of this world. That’s why it’s all the more difficult to wake up and go to work - just another mundane day. This morning, I just wanted to lie there and soak in this new energy and hope that it will transform me into something new. Something better.

So here it is Friday again, and so far, I have no plans. Last weekend, I decided on Plan A: OK Go concert with drummer boy and a bunch of people I don’t know. I had fun for the most part, though I’m still a little confused about drummer boy’s motivations. Every time I think I know, he does something to make me question what I thought I knew to be true. I am back to believing that he has no romantic interest in me whatsoever. He’s just really, really affectionate. If it were any other guy, I would say he’s giving off some pretty strong signals. But this is drummer boy: he who hugs a lot and rubs shoulders and places hand on smalls of back, a lot. Some might even say excessively. After the concert, four of us went out for sketchy Chinese food in sketchy Chinatown. I didn’t feel very well so I didn’t eat much. But let me just say, Black Pepper Beef is the shit. It doesn’t seem to be on the usual take-out menus. So, after Chinese food, I was Shanghai’d into driving drummer boy home. He talked my ear off for probably 45 minutes as we sat parked in front of his house. And in this 45 minutes, I would say there was a good 8 minutes of hugging. It was because he said he was leaving three times, and each time he needed a hug. A very long hug. He did explain that he likes to see people’s reactions to his extended hugs. But it does make me wonder if he ever gets into trouble this way.

Okay. Enough about drummer boy. Geez.

Like the weather, I can’t seem to make up my mind about a lot of things. Most importantly, I can’t decide whether or not to give up. Sometimes I feel a sense of hope, but then I always snap back to what seems to be my reality: despair. There is not a single area of my life that is satisfactory. If our lives are divided into four equally important areas - spiritual, physical, social, and emotional, I am lacking in every one. I feel spiritually empty, or confused at best, I have chronic pain and no energy, I’m socially awkward, and we all know I’m emotionally unbalanced. So where does that leave me? I will have to write more on this later.

Hope & Chocolate

I don't remember the last time I went home for Easter. I miss Easter. I find myself wishing I were back home. Beautifully coloured eggs, chocolate bunnies, and of course, the most important part, the Easter egg hunt. It was always a competition between my older sister and I. And after our own little family hunt, we would go to my grandparents, and my crazy uncle Bob would be our pretend Easter bunny, and he would hide countless golf balls on the property, and me, my sister and my cousins would have another hunt before the grand Turkey Dinner. Such amazing times I took for granted.

I really miss being a kid, and what I miss most about it is the mystery. The feeling that anything could happen, that anything is possible. The excitement of going to sleep one night to find that something magical had happened, right in your own backyard. That a mythical creature that should not logically exist, DOES exist, and the proof is in the chocolate. I miss those days when I truly believed that I was something really special. In fact, I believed I was a superhero. I believed there was some untapped resource inside me that would just wake up one day and change the world.

Only that never happened. I'm not a superhero. I haven't saved the world. I haven't even saved myself. I want that feeling back. Hope. I've lived without it for so long. But lately, every now and again, a little something wakes up inside and tries to ignite. But it doesn't take. Not yet.