A process in the weather of the heart...

Feeling generally run down and weary last week, I completely crashed into myself. Starting on Friday - no conversations, no phone calls, no checking of the email, no communication with the outside world. After about 48 hours, it had the effect of making me feel like I no longer exist, or like I exist in someone else's reality. Too much anesthesizing, too much never-minding, too much sleeping, and I turn into a ghost.

It could have been a spa weekend, a productive weekend, a weekend spent painting walls or cleaning or working on third and fourth drafts. Instead, my schedule consisted of:
*Sleeping. Power napping. Light napping. Heavy sleeping. Couch sleeping. Bed sleeping. Chair sleeping. Bath sleeping.
*Reading in various locations, all of them indoors. Collected stories of Amy Hempel and A.M. Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life.
*Watching movies. Happy Accidents because of Vincent D'Onofrio, The Minus Man because Janeane Garofalo had a small part, The Tenants because it was based on a novel by Bernard Malamud, Broken Flowers, and Perception.
*Writing first drafts, which isn't the same as working because the work part starts with the second draft. I can't say anything was accomplished, since the dialogue I get out of spending so much time inside my head is wobbly and sounds like someone else wrote it. It reminds me of how my best friend in high school used to say that his mother was a walk-in and he suspected it happened during her electroshock therapy. I haven't had ECT, but I sometimes feel like someone else has taken over for a walk-on part until I'm ready to be my charming self again.

If it is possible, I am a shade paler. My eyes hurt from too much reading, TV, or sleeping - I'm not sure which. I probably have a vitamin deficiency because the only green vegetable I ate was iceberg lettuce. I bought milk and cereal from CVS for dinner on Saturday because I only wanted to go to one place and come back home. It was also lunch and dinner on Sunday. My phone rang and rang and rang. I didn't answer it. I didn't even look at the caller ID until last night. I keep thinking, "one more month, one more month" because I know September will take the summer away. I have Seasonal Affective Disorder in reverse, but I don't think a light box would do much good. Do they make a dark box? I can't spend so much time inside - my head or the house - without feeling like I'm a little bit nuts.

Now I need music, conversation, exercise, movement, a hold on my Netflix queue, noise, my sense of humor, a change of scenery, a new pair of shoes, paint samples, the opposite of a hiatus, and some forward motion.

A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.
~Dylan Thomas