The Mountainside

Do you ever have weeks that leave you feeling like you’ve done nothing other than lean your weight against whatever mountainside it is you’d meant to scale? I feel completely halted in every sense of the word down to this deadish weight in my arms. I sat a great deal today, trying to think of where to move to. I’ve been reading. The thing that goes through my mind is, when do these characters have time to do the work of  living? They’re all running around feeling and experiencing things and having poignant conversation and being obsessed with their whales, but when do they do the fucking dishes? When does Jason Bourne stop to address his thirst? I would be so thirsty running like that for all those days on end. When do any of these people pay their phone bills, and why aren’t they worried about whether it’s being done? They just constantly have phone service. It is granted to them. Phones exist in their world so they have the room to make these exceptional leaps of character growth. Because how the fuck else?

Meanwhile, over here, I’m not saving the world from anything because I’m too busy making sure the mail went out and the mail came in and the lights are turned off when I leave the room and the AC filters are changed every three months. Modern life has somehow become something whose successes are defined by an absence of domestic flare ups. Are there no red marks on my credit? Good. Are the carpets in my car recently shampooed? Is there food in the fridge and is there mold on it and is at least a portion of it made out of vegetable matter? This has become the mark of being on track. And the hours it takes just to maintain it starts to eat into the parts of my lifetime I’d set aside for accomplishing real things. But then I have those days where I drop it all and I think that will free up some time by being reckless, only to find that the only thing I really found time for was the space to sit down against that proverbial mountainside and just breathe.