Stories of A: period of darkness in my life

When your coffee gets cold and you run out of lead, when there are no clean knives for spreading butter and it rains all the time.

When you find yourself looking out the window as if you expect something to happen that will change everything.. something that will make you want to start over.

You go about living the way you always have, but that pressing feeling on your shoulders, that weight that can’t be lifted, still resides in you. And no matter how many parties you attend and how many photographs you hang, it doesn’t go away.

Most days you get out and take your mind off of it, most days you succeed.

But there will always be some days when you just want to hide under the soft linens, and not show your face to the world for a while. And then that thought, that weight, that feeling- it swims to the front of your mind. And no matter how long you sit in your shower, no matter how many times you change your hair and listen to new music or perhaps attempt to fall in love, you cannot avoid it.

You can get drinks with your friends and fawn over babies in grocery stores, buy used books and make hot cups of tea.

You can write stories and paint the African landscape, listen to the tales of strangers, climb trees and look out over your small corner of the world.

You’ll try to change things, you’ll do your best to alter the tides in your life. It will work for a short while, but then even that doesn’t satisfy you.

And one day, after you do all of these things countless times, you find you cannot keep pushing that eternal feeling of restlessness into the back of your mind.

It no longer helps to go about these daily activities, and even the most drastic turns of the current don’t affect you.

So you’ll pack your things and leave notes for the people who need them, and you’ll find yourself at the airport, a railroad terminal, or perhaps a port on the coast.

You’ll hop on a freighter, or a plane, or that train with the familiar whistle you always hear in your sleep. You’ll look out at the land or sea that you’re moving over, and you’ll feel a sense of relief.

Not total contentment, not yet. But the pressure that has been on your shoulders for so long, that restless feeling of dissatisfaction, the load you’ve carried throughout your days- it is finally getting lighter.

So you’ll look from your window, or you’ll stand at the bow, and you’ll breathe in deep. It doesn’t matter where you’re going, it doesn’t even matter if you know yet.

But it is then, as you look around at your surroundings, that you’ll think, “this is it."