Do You Have A Minute?

I'm sitting here alone in my quiet house at what I always know to be my best time of day.  I'm a gloaming kind of girl.  I have a stack of engaging books most half read, a brand new issue of bon appetit and nothing but time.  The thing is though that tonight I just want to talk.  I need to talk.  I want to spill about today, this week, this summer, this season in my life.


The problem is that I feel like there is no one I want to burden with this heaviness.  No one who gets me (enigmatic)...gets this (angst).  It doesn't help that I have been keeping to myself out of need and out of desire.  It's just that I've been feeling fragile in a way that seems scary.  So I want to talk, but I feel isolated, estranged and distant from people in my life that I would normally turn to.  Mainly because I don't want to talk nice and happy about the weather (beautiful), baseball (on fire) or the best calamari I ever had (melt in your mouth), I want to talk about feelings, fears and frustrations.  I want to dig in deep to the messy stuff.


The truth is that I've been wading through the muck and the mire for awhile now.  I've been a one woman excavating expedition.  It has been immeasurably illuminating. The process of coming clean has been testing me in ways beyond my mettle, yet I'm still standing, smiling and even singing.  I guess that makes me stronger than I give myself credit for.

It's also the truth that there are so many joy moments in most every day.  I'm filled with gratitude more often than not.  Not forced or contrived contentment, but organic, inherent happiness.  The dailiness of life delights me.  Delights I say. And then one moment all is right with my world... the next I'm questioning what and who I know, the point, the importance, the meaning.  That quickly feels like despair.  OK, despair may be a little dramatic.  I feel like I go from delight to dashed hopes one hundred times each day. I feel like The Little Engine Who Could: I-Think- I-Can-I- Think-I-Can only what I hear is I-Think-I-Can, I-Think-I-Can-But-Why?  I'm a self-proclaimed pessimist, but an aspiring optimist.  I know the point. I get it.  What I don't get is how it is possible that the more I feel like I understand myself, the less I understand other people.  The good thing is that I want to understand them.  I won't give up.  I'm a pessimist, not a quitter.  Just like everyone else, like life, I'm an enigma through and through.