Lagging

I have been perspiring non-stop since I've been back.

After a shower. During my sleep. Lying on the bed, reading. Unpacking. Whatever.

I'm just so glad, after a week of being wrapped up in layer after layer, I could jump back into my tank-and skirt combi and my Birkies.


And I've been stuck in only one mood since I've been back.

Stoned.

It's either the jetlag. Or, it's some mild depression again.

It could be both, actually.

I slept almost the entire day. I slept, woke up with a headache, continued sleeping, woke up again with the headache, and the cycle repeated till I woke up with no more headache.

Now I'm like an owl. Eyes wide open.


In a span of one week, I've watched 'Elizabethtown' five freakin' times.

And finally, I know the ending.

A very mushy and predictable one. The kind that makes you go, "Huh?!?! How the hell can this be?".

I kinda regretted watching it over again. Nah, I didn't watch it over again. I fast-forwarded again.


I opened the mailbox last night to find it filled to the brim. And I wondered - again - why no one in the family attends to the mailbox whenever I'm out of town.

One letter came from the traffic folks, and said my appeal had been approved and my offence waived.

I should've been happy, but I was more like, "What the hell? Which offence are you talking about now?!"

Yeah, I've chalked up so many offences in the past few months, I really don't remember what I'm being pardoned for now.


Now that I'm back home and unpacking my luggage, I'm wondering why the hell I bought so many clothes for the little man.

There are like five tiny shorts and seven tiny stripey polo-shirts. And he goes out like once or twice a week - if he's lucky.

What was I thinking?


I am still feeling a little out of sorts.

Things I thought have stopped depressing me, have once again started to.

Like the gates at the arrival hall. The shoes in my bag. The watch on my wrist. The 'bookmark' in my book.

It's just a cycle, I keep telling myself.

It'll pass over soon, and I'll get over it then.


*****

I'm reading a book titled "Name All The Animals" - a memoir that talks about the loss of a loved one.

I was particularly captured by Chapter 24, when it started off like this:

I do not know what possessed the Sisters of Mercy to open a school for girls. Service to the poor, not education, was their intended vocation. It was clear that, while education may have been their profession, service was their passion. The nuns were always piling us into vans, Sister Aquinas at the wheel, and taking us to shelters and soup kitchens and prisons. Morning announcements were peppered with pleas for volunteers. I made up cots in homeless shelters, talked to inmates in the county jail, read the Catechism to elderly women in nursing homes, and sang songs with schizophrenics at the state hospital, all before the age of sixteen. In the dimly lit basement hall of Saints Peter and Paul's Soup Kitchen, in the back alleys behind the bus station, in the urine-scented wards of the state mental hospital, I saw, firsthand, that it was possible to lose everything and still go on.

What a powerful statement it was, the last one.

I took it as a message to me.


*****

I was amused when I caught Piper sleeping in my bag again last night.

Was she trying to say, "Mommy, don't go again" or "Mommy, don't forget me again"?

Haha.