write me

my sister doesn't write much, though she is who started me down the writing road. she used to write, poems, and read shakespeare. she is why i love shakespeare. i always wanted to catch up with her in the literary realm.

well, now, on ocassion, by a lark, as they might say, she writes something down. and, well, it made me cry.

i go back and forth between being too tired to cry, and being too tired not to cry. i'm in one of those too tired to cry phases right now. i just feel unmoved by pretty much everything. until i read her words.

her plaintive cry so clearly laid out, so cutting and raw. and the tears just came. i told her,

you must write more.

but she doesn't have time on her side, with six kids she is devoted to. and an actual family life. her husband adores her and she him. they have it all.

which is why i suffocate when i'm there, i love being there, i love being with them, but i can't handle it many times because it's so not where i'm at. my agenda is so much different. i guess when i go there and take off visiting, which i'm inclined to do, it helps me feel a part of my life there. to reconnect with friends there, to find lost loves there.

when i don't do that, i come home gasping for air because it is all honeysuckle and roses. i guess that is a good feeling, one we want when we go visit familia. we want to be embraced, smothered even. at least that is how my family is. and so, when i come home and am a free agent again, i fall over from leaning so hard into the one i've hugged the past week or so.

it's tough.

but this wasn't where i was headed with this. i've gone far off track.

and today i will try to find my way to the nation who will embrace me. try to spend the day not thinking about work, not visiting work, because i need to have a day off now and again. and actually take it.

i think my home, more than anything, is the source of my great exhaustion. i have so many hopes, had so many ideas about what was going to occur, and all i have are empty spaces.

i'm told the apartment i'm renting is furnished, which is nice because i have nothing. i imagined a room full of pillows and i would be very middle eastern or asian in that sense. i don't mind floorsitting, in fact, i prefer it when it comes right down to it. guests like furniture i think.

that one apartment i looked at and really wanted, it had a room with all wood floors which i would have left mostly unfurnished so i could dance. it was the perfect dance studio room. but that will have to wait.

for now, i am going in another direction. and trying to find my way there from kindness to kindness. mine and another's. so far, the remedy is holding and even the people at work seem to understand there's something special going on.

i try to remember a few names each time i work, and greet these customers by name. it's tough, but it is happening slowly. people light up when you call their name, i understand this. and we need business. we've been doing better than we had been, and i think it is because people feel we're genuine. i like to believe that how we live our lives means something in this world. that the work of our hands does not go unnoticed, and when you care, others respond in kind. that is what i tell myself.

morbidly optimistic, i call it. because it makes me laugh. and i need to laugh. today more than any, when tears have found me again.