Today I got off work at noon. It’s weird now, how I’m thinking that I will miss having random days and times off when I start my 9-to-5 desk job this coming Monday. It’s been so long since I’ve been a member of a “normal” work force. Office job. Not retail. We’ll see how that goes.
Anyway it’s 2:00 p.m. now. I need a project or I will wine. It’s 5:00 somewhere.
I have a room full of boxes. Dreaded boxes. Boxes filled with memories, but not the right boxes, because I gave Tommy the wrong box numbers, or they didn’t fit in his car. I find it scary sometimes how a simple detail like a box number (or such things as such) can sometimes derail my entire mental trajectory.
I need a project, a diversion. I persevere. I work my Spanish lessons, I empty the garbage and I have imaginary conversations with the man I want to fall in love with.
I purge yet again. I dig through the crap and purge and toss and donate (ok, maybe I save some stuff for a maybe-tomorrow).
And I make my way to the magic box.
Art supplies. Macrame supplies. Hoops, beads, yarn. Brushes, paints, easels and canvas. Pencils and notebooks, many of them so very recently acquired with a wish and a hope and a plan. And my own paintings from my art school days.
They all (all of them!) go into a drawer from yesterday to look at tomorrow. Another tomorrow.
And then I find a baggie full of refrigerator magnets. And for a moment, I find my happy place.
So very long ago, I started collecting these symbols of some fantasy-fantastic-could-I-really-ever-desire in every state I visited. I was somewhat surprised at how many I had actually acquired, but I was more disappointed in how many more are missing. And just for the record (full transparency), there were a few that were gifts from friends (who missed me while traveling in states [and one or two countries] without me).
So, now, this evening, I arrange them, very neatly and geographically on my refrigerator.
A virtual and geographical map of my past and my future.
With my future in the very front of my mind.
And the past being sipped, savored, and then forgotten, in a glass of wine.