State of Flux

Things do not suddenly feel the same anymore. Something has changed, but I do not know quite what exactly the problem, if there is a problem, is. I feel half like I need a change of scenery or something completely new to explore and half like I simply want to retreat from this world for a while into one in which the hardest decision to make is done from a sofa under a slew of blankets and involves choosing which movie to watch first. I alternately feeling the need to have other people around me and wanting no one at all to even call on the telephone.

My house is the biggest mess (and yes, I realize, for most people it would not be considered as such) it has been since I moved in, and yet I have not the time to tend to it for working so much. I am tired of looking at the Christmas decorations that should no longer be there, and yet, I dread the comparatively bare look that will return once they are taken down. I do not want the food that I have in the house, but going out hardly provides anything enticing enough to make the effort to go after at the moment. I have seen most of my friends and family members on the last few weeks, but mostly in small doses and with very little quality one and one time so that I feel like I’ve met my social obligations but only in a bare minimum sort of way. Everything has been so out of sorts that nothing seems quite the same, not even the clothes I choose to put on each day. My shoes seem all too familiar, the rooms of my house, even the furniture arrangement. Yet, I have no solution, no way to change it, and no routine to fall back on to return a feeling of normalcy. I don’t even know that I want to change anything or that it would do any good.

I feel the need desperately to produce something creative, something fresh and new to expunge this feeling, and yet I know not how exactly to do that. I fear if I pull out the paintbrush, I will be looking at a blank canvas for hours with nothing to show for it. My writing, even here, is not completely fulfilling my creative needs at this exact moment, cooking won’t do it, even my music seems to need an alteration, yet I know now where to turn for a new tune or a new song. Even the new stuff seems that same, somehow. Every bar, every restaurant, every street seems old hat at the moment, predictable and unsatisfying to the point of almost being annoying.

It’s not like there is something wrong with my life at the moment. I have everything I could possibly need. I am sure the feeling will pass; I just wish it would hurry in doing so. I have come to hate this time of year. The holidays have passed; there is no more constant excitement. While it is often overwhelming, all that must be done in December; there is a huge difference when you pair it with the dark and dreary winter of January and February. Sunday afternoons seem dead and dreary, the streets empty and the sky gray. Evenings are filled with dark skies and the light of television screens. Passion, excitement, and romance seem to have fallen dead with the trees, buried somewhere beneath the cold, gray earth.

Winter is a death, a dying of the earth before a spring renewal. It would seem that it has taken my sense of contentment with it this year. I yearn for something more, something new; and, yet, I do now know what. Things are changing again; I am in a state of flux. Where it shall lead me, I do not know.