9.6.01

i wake most days with a curiously hollow feeling, as if i lost something last night and haven’t quite remembered what it is yet. i’m greeted by this sense of let-down, the sort of feeling you get as little kid waking up the day after christmas and realizing that there’s nothing but january ahead of you. perhaps it’s the season, because i’ve always hated fall. there’s something about the dying-ness of all of it that just gives me the creeps. give me a cold nasty spring day anytime over the slanty fall sunshine. i think part of the problem is this house, too. when i was growing up here, this house generally had no less than six or seven people living here, plus enough animals to start our own neighborhood petting zoo. it was a house that was full of noise and laughter and chaos and life. now i’m back here, feeling lame for living with my parents five years after i left home the first time, and the house has grown silent like a tomb. my parents are both off to school and work at 7 am, and when i get up at 10, the house is cavernous and oppressively quiet. getting out of bed is a battle fought and won with inertia. i start with the simple motions; feed the cat, wash my face, maybe some cranberry juice. the sense of loss fades away as i get busy; once i’ve left the house there’s only a faint, nagging reminder that the empty space in the house is waiting for me at the end of the day. by the time i get in around 2 am, my parents are asleep and the house is dark and silent again. it’s fortunate that i’m a deeply proactive person; otherwise this depression might just engulf me. instead it just makes me dread the mornings.

the obvious solution here, you might point out, is to move out. find my own little space, or find some roommates to share a place. good point. but what the hell am i doing in Boise, Idaho? i came here for the theatre work. i’m living at home because otherwise the theatre would have housed me with some other host family. but the season is quickly drawing to a close and i hardly have anything lined up for the next year. this is, in part, because i am spending october and november in europe. i need to worry about what to do when i get back when i get back, but fundamentally, i’m a planner. i like having a few months laid out in advance. i’m reaching the end of my tether. it seems like a couple of months anywhere is about all i can take before i start getting antsy and need to move on to somewhere new – new challenges, people, places. i don’t deal with comfort very well, it seems. when i was in college my life was full enough that i never wanted to go some place else. what happened since then? i suppose there’s a reason when everyone tells you that the college years are the best, to cling to them and all that crap that, while true, can’t actually change the pace at which one lives one’s college years.

the simple truth is that i’m lonely.

i suppose this is enough self-pity for one day. tomorrow, i promise something more fun.