Scent of Rain

Finally it rains. I have been waiting for days for the rain to come, properly, with that true autumn feeling. It must have been ten days waiting already, though September has only just begun. My head was buzzing, my joy passes away together with the anticipation. But this morning the rain finally arrived. And I just stare out of the window, listening to the drops while my own tears fall in rhythm. I am not well. Sometimes we are not well. We do not always have to be well. A great hope of mine, tied to a new job, has dissolved and somehow it feels like the last drop that set off an avalanche. An avalanche of despair and inner collapse.

Yesterday was an emotional rollercoaster that within less than eight hours took me from determination to hopeful expectation and all the way to breaking down. That was, to put it gently, exhausting, and I vented my anger on my poor printer that had served me faithfully for ten years. May it rest in peace.

This morning I woke up with no idea what I should do. I do not know which way to go next. Months of unemployment, the sense of helplessness, it all makes me weak.

My thoughts are racing. I am a strong woman. The kind who can mend a child's trousers in two minutes before school, the kind who can pack up and move a whole life from one place to another in just two days. And yet now it feels like there is a gaping black hole in my chest.

As always, I fled into food to quiet the anxiety, and along with the guilt over waste came the extra kilos. As if it were not enough to be sad and lost and hopeless, I also have to face the fact that I carry around the weight of another person on my body each night. The burden of the soul joined by the burden of the body. And I wonder about the breaking point of the mind. Though in truth, I do not wonder.

Even if for a moment I feel strong, despite the healing promise of the three-kilometre walk that lies ahead, when I return it is as if I have stepped on a deathly energy-draining Mario block. Stuck in tar nothing happens, I neither die nor live. The Catch-22: I have no energy to move and yet only movement could give me energy. The mind's silly illusion is that energy can be stolen from chocolate or other cheap and quick temptations. The more you move the fitter and more alive you are and maybe this is the one thing I cannot ever truly begin alone. Not physically but mentally. I just cannot. In thirty-something years I have come to know myself that well. A reboot is needed. A great reboot.

So I go and walk in the rain and hide my tears among the raindrops before I return to the black hole. Perhaps I will not be gone for three kilometres…