2002-10-21 12:02 p.m.
cold out, warm inside

The clock's ticking.

I have until Saturday 1PM (just like a final, how about that) to finish a first draft of my play. Will that happen? I doubt it, but it's a nice incentive. There'll be real, live actors waiting for me at the finish line.

And I'm not worried.

I'm more worried about Sunday, when I have to bake 600 cookies in one day for gift bags for a benefit the theater's throwing. Why did I sign up for this again?

The change of seasons is comforting. That first bite of winter, the first morning you get up and shiver on the way to the bathroom, realize you need a coat, always delicious.

It's time to start making soups, stroll around Prospect Park drinking hot cider and watching little bundled-up kids falling over each other while they play in the middle of a field.

And what else? I don't know this time.

I'm not going home for Thanksgiving, despite everyone wanting me to. Somehow, it feels right to spend this one alone, or nearly so (I'm going to invite friends over, but I'm not expecting any of them to come). Amy and I are talking about throwing a post-Thanksgiving dinner for folks recovering from family trauma (and in the case of one of her friends, there's plenty to recover from — a nonfunctional alcoholic mother who's having a brain tumor removed after it was discovered following an intervention), and that'll be nice...but mostly, being alone right now just feels right.

(I don't know that S or D or Rachel ever knew this, but I was never so ferociously needy, so reliant on people as I was when I was living in that house in August (the month I met S). I was exhausted from the pressures of trying to get a job, of ekeing out a painfully-drab existence with work that numbed me, of trying to break into an industry run by children (comics), and of trying to get approval from everyone else when I wasn't doing anything where I'd get it from myself.

Nothing now feels as desperate as life did then. I have the space to be myself, the time to pull this play out of my mouth like a liquid thread of magic mirror, and the calm to do both.)