It's almost midnight and I am the kind of tired where it feels like your eyeballs are two sizes too big for their sockets and made of roughest grade sandpaper, and that someone is pushing the palms of their hands much too hard against the front of your head. The kind of tired where you do things like put the milk away in the pantry and your children into the fridge.
I am in need of crochet at the moment. It's easy and repetitive and keeps the maelstrom of random anxietys from building into a tornado. I have nothing to be anxious about. I am anxious about everything.
I bought the cushion with birthday money. It sits on my bed, looking very pretty. A fair trade product, the lace was handmade by someone in the Godavari Delta Lace Cooperative. The women who make such lace deserve a lot more space from me than one badly constructed paragraph, I know. I'm sorry. It's beautiful though, isn't it? I have been reading Half the Sky, and it's just ripping me into shreds. Women suffer in this world. Girls suffer even more. If I can have the pleasure of owning such a beautiful piece of handwork at the same time as helping its creator earn a living wage, well then. No question.
No-one knows where the hell the freesias that are growing in my front garden have come from, as welcome as they are. There are only two possible reasons for this: I planted them months ago and early memory loss has caused me to completely forget this ever happened, or some freesia obsessed ninja is running around the neighbourhood somewhere shoving bulbs at will into random gardens. It's clearly the latter.
Every morning I am faced with this view of my 175mcg dose of levothyroxine, spread amongst three different bottles for reasons I have never quite figured out. For the first nine months or so I was religiously observant about taking them every day, at the right time, in the right way. Now I'm losing track. Did I take them today or didn't I? Did I eat first? Was that two from that bottle? I think it's denial. I'm going grey, I need hormone replacement, I still haven't achieved bugger all with this privileged life of mine. I'd rather pretend none of these things are true.
If I turn my head a little to the left, I can see this tree out my kitchen window. It's the third year I've witnessed these blossoms appear at the end of winter. They knock me out every time. It doesn't matter how things are going in my life, what I've forgotten, whose suffering I am fretting about, when I look at them I just feel better. They just go about being all blossomy and beautiful, even if no-one notices, even if no-one cares.
It's well past midnight now. I really need a sleep.
