birthday blues

After years of throwing away countless recyclables in the form of milk cartons, beverage containers, plastic cups and newspapers, I decided I would direct these products out of the cafe to the recycling station recently opened at the Nature Museum. To my current diet of disappointment, I added what was essentially a glorified garbage bin. To call it a station is to call a television with no cable watchable.

To make matters worse, it was accompanied by a wet slap of snow in the face. I spent much of the day with soaked shoes and socks. Had it been a light snow, rather than that heavy mess fueled by winds that propelled the flakes sideways, I might have been delighted to see the snow.

Emotionally, I feel like a jack o'lantern. All that I used to muster up the enthusiasm to carry on idle chatter, emanate concern for the smallest of offenses, and maintain a projection of happiness is gone. I am empty. For now, I feel most comfortable with those whose words are endless to soothe me.

It is no surprise then that the kid leaves me restless. I have no patience for his moping, his quietness, his dullness. Awkward silences plague us while I mentally grapple for something, anything that will coax conversation out of him, but he stubbornly refuses my attempts; he is on spring break so I have to spend all day with him in this state.

And then there is him. Every smiling phrase is an arrow directly in that closing wound, every word spoken from that asterisked list sours our conversations, every thought spirals back toward his attempt at deceit. Some say this is a cycle, one that I won't break. To me, every situation like this one is an isolated devastation that leaves me haunted. I imagine packing my bag and leaving. The part of me that loves him does so with such unconditionality that I cannot follow through. I hate questioning him and by proxy, myself, I long for that time to be over, for that wondering to end.

Why do I keep looking? Simply because I keep finding something to see. Perhaps these are the symptoms of my psyche's patient zero or maybe this is just part of our mutual intolerance. Maybe it is because I am at the threshold of another event, this one another year to add to my age.

Today was the first day in a long time that I imagined finding another city somewhere else to disappear to, where I have no one to answer to for a while, where recycling is not a farce, where I could do something different. For a few blocks it was Paris, for twenty seconds it was Heidelberg, Germany, and in a store it could have been Portland, Oregon.

Then I paid my overdue cell phone bill with my tax refund. That's the punchline.