My body’s started reacting to the heat with a strong, intense pulse. When I go out and it’s very hot, which has happened often this summer, my heart starts beating quickly and intensely. I can feel my pulse thumping in my chest. I start breathing faster and feeling light-headed. My fiance taught me breathing techniques to help me calm this down, but it’s still a weird feeling to feel as if you are about to pass out every time you step outside.
I always say that I love summer, but it doesn’t love me back.
The plums on my kitchen table have gone bad. I told my mother-in-law (although I guess she’s not that quite yet, not-quite-yet-mother-in-law is a bulky term to use), anyway I told her that she gave me too much and we wouldn’t be able to eat it all in time. I still feel like a failure for letting them go bad. I just didn’t get around to eating them all in time. We would say in Croatian, “nisam stigla,” a phrase whose most literal translation is “I didn’t arrive.”
The heart is a muscle, and so is writing. We know muscles require constant exercise, but I’ve neglected mine. Time crushes me as it passes. I feel as if I can never catch up. Then again writing is a muscle you can really only exercise when everything else in your life is alright. I guess some people write best when upending their lives, and strong emotions do drive art, but I can only create stuff after the fact. In the moment, all I can really manage are journal entries and weepy poetry.
I guess this is my way of explaining my absence.
My circulation isn’t that great either. My feet and hands are ice cold in the middle of summer. Robi says it’s because I’m too stationary, both due to the fact that I sit for work and due to exhaustion. He’s a medical professional, so I tend to believe him, especially about stuff I don’t want to hear. I used to be a college athlete (club rugby). A terrible one, to be sure, but there was a time in my life when I was at practice four times a week, games on the weekends, and sometimes the gym in my spare time. Yesterday I couldn’t fully run two loops of our local park. I walked most of the way and even the running I did do was more of a jog. One foot in front of the other, like the cliches say, but it’s how you do it.
It’s hard not to compare myself to who I was in college. I feel like I did everything, while now I’m a nobody who gets overwhelmed freelancing. But I also did a lot of crying in college, os it’s probably not a good point of comparison.
I’m trying now. One foot in front of the other. One heartbeat at a time.
You're your only pressure keeper now. Self-accountability is exhausting. Put one foot behind the other. If you're backwards you're still going forward. If you're going backward you're still looking forward. Per Spective.
P.S. You could have plummeled rocks with the rotten fruit. For catharsis.