where I am

I remember feeling like this. I was those first few months in Costa Rica. Everyday was a dark one. A foreign culture, absence of security of the familiar, no friends who you could trust to write and keep up with you (what can you expect? You have disappeared into a black hole.), everyday waking up to get on a bus to a place where you do not want to go, and all of this with the constant feeling of being apart from the one place you want to go: Scotland.

No, it has not disappeared. I give myself hope by saying that if Scotland is finite there will be an end to it. But I have never found that end, and it is possible that I will never find it because it is a subjective icon of the infinite. I don’t know if such things exist, but that is the only thing that seems to fit.

I am fighting for my life, though right now I am more like Sir Andrew, curling up in a corner to “bleed a while”:

“Fight on my men” sir Andrew says,
“A little I’m hurt, but yet not slain,
I’ll but lie and bleed a while,
And then I’ll rise and fight again.”

It is like all life has been dried up and what is left is being squeezed out in assignments. Every task is a mountain, and there is no strength, no motivation, not even a reason, to climb up. I am a hollow person doing hollow things. There is nothing to say but “I don’t know”. There is nothing to feel but the common sensations that remain only on that level. Those things which once had dimension, wind, sky, music, dance are vacant now. I can imagine their fullness, and I remember it, but it does not touch me. I eat because I breath, and it is good that I am in a habit of eating, or it might be a chore. Last night I found for the first time in a horrible long time that I could not muster up a smile to the person on the road. I am at my end.

But then I am surrounded with people here, and those who respect me and think that I am on some profound journey to light, but I can see no light, and what if I never reached it? Would it make the journey any less? Would they still support my quest? What if it turns out that there is nothing more to be discovered than that I am just a sloth, poor writer, lousy academic and hitherto a brilliant actress?

Spring is here, but winter has taken my life so that it no longer matters. I am that prisoner who died five minutes before the allies opened the gates. I am the Lady of Shalott who died before reaching Camelot.