Unfinished Business

For a long time I was unhappy and hiding it from myself.

This takes some doing, let me tell you, but I managed it, on and off, for quite some time.

In that time, there were a number of indicators of my unhappiness, a couple of which are only becoming apparent to me now.

I love Italian food. Such food lends itself well to a glass of wine with a meal. The problem with this is that there is now an open bottle of wine in the vicinity of someone who has just eaten a fine meal, and is in the mood for...a glass of wine. I acknowledge that this doesn't sound all that unusual and/or bad. That's because I stopped writing about it at the second glass of wine mark.

This combined with free coffee at work meant that by the time I got home I really needed a drink to relax. Of course, this meant that the next morning, I really needed some coffee. Rinse. Repeat. It dulled the flames.

I stopped finishing books. This has only just hit me; what a shame this was. My favourite authors became too intense, too vivid, too achingly emotional to read. I would veer off from reading a book only half way through, and some not even that far. I would still shop for books, as though I was still enjoying them.

Just as I stopped reading, my writing stopped completely. My opinion of my writing plummeted; even pieces I once held as my best. My worst work seemed incomprehensibly poor. The darkness around the fire seemed a lot deeper.

I stopped listening to music. I couldn't be bothered to turn on the stereo beyond a twenty minute period of unlistened-to radio in the morning, when it was nothing more than background noise. I didn't take my stereo to work. The crackle of the dying fire was the only noise.

And in this time I would sleep, eat, wake, go to work, vegetate and sit. The world kept turning, the sun shone occasionally, as it does normally, and life ticked on. Dreams and hopes drifted into a place where they seemed divorced and separated from daily life...a place that was visited, occasionally, but it took more and more effort as time went by. The embers were glowing.

But events conspired. I found myself between a rock and a hard place and decided that things had to change. So they did. (The solution to this age old problem of rocks and hard places - go sideways)

Things stopped decaying, which was an obvious improvement, but the embers were still only glowing, if with a brighter tinge. I did what most people do in that situation...I explored my new freedoms, looked for myself in places I had previously been - both metaphorical and geographical.

And then, there was a bit of a spark. Despite it making NO financial sense, NO reasonable sense and lacking, as things tend to round these parts, sensible planning and preparation (see Passport, Lack Of), I decided to leave Hatfield for a while, and go to New York.

I had been invited to a birthday party.
It would have been rude not to.

New York; where the fires of my life were stoked up, encouraged, fuelled and fed until they have become higher than they have ever been.

I feel sharper in the mornings; drink less coffee, less wine. My mind dances through music. It barrels through the written word, hunting meaning and emotion and pattern and enjoying every second of the search regardless of what it finds; I am reading two books at the moment - The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and a book I shied away from after a hundred pages, ages ago - Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

I'm not sure if you know that I keep blogging and other writing pretty separate, apart from the few entries under the title 'Songs' there in the sidebar...and looking back, whilst writing about anything and everything, as any of us can, I stopped talking about me, how I was (beyond 'muh'), and anything of any personal honesty. Well, this changes that a bit too.

And I have started writing.

I am in love, but so much more than that...I feel alive again.

Me.

So thank you.