(looking up from an office chair)

So, yes: I disappeared there for a little while, for all kinds of reasons that I haven't fully articulated even to myself and thus can't be expected to articulate to you. Part of it, I realized as I walked toward the office this morning, has to do with the fact that the things I most want and need to write down are not things I can or will share in even this semi-public place: they're too close, too emotional, too inexplicable, too touching to me and possibly not touching enough to you. They're the deep pleasure of skipping town while a life-defining meeting is going on, winding up in a place that usually seems distant and off-limits during the week and thus feels surreal and yet is suddenly made so startlingly actual. They're angers and frustrations I'm not willing to share--not here, not with anyone, not least because of a growing sense that even I don't care about them and am thus not interested in hashing through them with others who won't care either. They're strange mixes of futility and earnestness, of activity and lassitude, of happy solitude and a loneliness that feels as though it grows more entrenched, more possibly permanent, with each passing day.

Too much of me wants neither to worry anyone nor to anger or offend anyone else with my current range of annoyances and pricklinesses and worries; instead of risking any of the above, I end up using the Cabinet chiefly as a way to reach the sites with which I brakcet my days or use up my spare and tired mid-afternoon minutes.

Last Monday, I walked home for lunch and my early afternoon work, and the world was brilliant. Only today have I had (or found, or made) the time to move the pictures to my camera.

Later in the week, getting up in the early morning dark to take the dog out to the yard, I ran into the edge of the open bedroom door, head-first. My chief response was to be thankful that I hadn't been wearing my glasses.

I am finding that many days, I feel the way I imagine the bird who hit my front window and made this print must have felt. Everything continues apace; most things seem fine; I find myself continuing to be unable to get some crucial aspects of my job done in the good time I hope for them, but I also put in 12+ hour days and thus do my best not to fault myself.

And suddenly the better part of the leaves has fallen; we've moved swiftly through the colorful weeks and into the part of the season of which I'm not fond: the moment when someone needs to get those damned leaves off the ground, a job that falls squarely into the realm of domestic things about which I could not care less. Which is why it's good that there are people who make money by doing such jobs for others.

Since this is a pivotal year, and yet another year--of so many lined up in a row this way, at least two more to go--of perching in a highly temporary living situation, I find myself thinking about where I ultimately want to land. It seems significant that this afternoon my imagination wandered to a nearby town where not another person I know lives. In fact, it's no mystery to me: that wandering is just one more attempt to deal with feeling too vined, too twined up, too caught--and too often annoyed and exhausted to have even the faintest idea about how to figure out what to do next.

And so I am going along, knowing that something different is coming, because that's becoming inevitable, and also knowing that the process of disentangling myself from what's around me now is going to keep me occupied for quite some time while whatever that different thing is is gathering itself and coming closer.