I’ve felt off lately. Only this year, it’s not a scratchy throat and sniffly nose. It’s internal, a vast, cloudy feeling that’s been colonizing larger and larger tracts of my consciousness. Sometimes, it sends me on long walks through the glen or across empty fields, and other times, it leaves me lying in bed and staring at my ceiling. I’m not entirely sure whether I walk to escape it or search for it, or if I lie down because it’s washing over or in order to let it do so. I’m not entirely sure what to even call it.
It feels incipient, the mental equivalent of the early symptoms of a cold I had last year. And like last year, I don’t know if it’ll just fizzle out the week after I post this and make me regret pointing it out at all. And maybe it won’t.
I also don’t know if this feeling is strictly good or bad. It doesn’t feel like I’m about to be washed over with endless, inexplicable joy, but non-happiness doesn’t have to be harmful. This isn’t a thing that I can wipe out with orange juice and Dayquil, but neither is it something that I need to wipe out.
All this is to say, I don’t really know what’s going on, and I don’t really know what’s going to come of it. But this is is where I’m at, and really, how is that much different than how things normally are?
Rachel Alatalo 