I have a lovely post about autumn waiting to be published, full of colors and special autumn feelings, but I suspect it will be winter by the time I get it posted.      I’m writing from the gallery now- my machine it home has been hoarding all my unwritten posts, but it refuses to share me with the world.   My connection is still barely working, and I despair, unwilling to battle with it any longer.   But I’m camped out alone in the gallery for the rest of the work week, so  I don’t have my notes with me, I’m not going to talk about the season, I’m not going to compose, I’m just going to give you what I’ve got at the moment.

I’ve been busy, urgently busy, with this ever-building list of missions that I MUST accomplish before my trip.   These demand all my free time and effort.     Everything needs to be perfect.   I need to feel masterful.   It wasn’t until yesterday, when looking down upon a menagerie of grinning skulls that I had just dedicated my day to, that I thought maybe I was being unreasonable.   Maybe I was masking my real mission.

I’ve been having Ideas and making them happen, immediately, relentlessly.   Because I need to know that desires can be made real. I need to know that I have this power.  That I can hold something formless in my heart and then bring it out and hold it in my hand.   I need to feel like dreams don’t melt in the light, but that they gestate as we hold on to them.   They stay inside of us until they are ready.

I will admit, and this has been a lonely, guarded secret of mine, that I spend a lot of my day looking into the mirror.     Its the first thing I do after dragging myself out of bed in the morning, and I feel like death in the morning; perhaps its my ritual of resurrection.   Before I bathe I’ll stand there naked and remind my body that it exists.   That I still know and love it.   That I’m still here.   Just like I was yesterday.    When R lived with me he would wake me up every morning, gently enough, and laugh at the state of me, so even before the blur had left my eyes, I’d been welcomed back into the world.   I’d curse him out but I loved that, and miss it.  Don’t mistake it for vanity, nor do I just myself and dig away at the flaws.  I just need to check in and see that things are all right, and I see it in my own eyes.   It’s reassuring.

I got a haircut yesterday, after much debating the need for it.   I loved it, and then not so much, when I took my cute new city hair out into the far lonesome country, and I just wanted something to keep the chill of my neck, something that fell heavy like a cowl, and I missed my old hair.    This cut is designed to open and soften my look,  to hide my troubled brow, to show my eyes and smile.     I wasn’t so comforable with that last night, when saying goodnight to the mirror.  I wanted to feel hard and distant.

I’ve been staying in one of the abandoned bedrooms of my grandma’s farmhouse, which is a short walk from the gallery but so far from the rest of the world.   Fortunately there’s lots of work here to keep me busy, but as soon as its all put away and the world is sleeping, that’s when it all sneaks up on me, and its just me, my bright eyes and the night.

But for now there is daylight, and work to be done, and I shall return to it for awhile.