Mixed

I'm overtired and I can't sleep. My thoughts race, doom following fantasy chasing minutia round and round my skull.

I miss Boston for all that was wonderful - Trader Joe's, Pace's Deli, the harbor ferries, places to walk, the light on the architecture, the moisture, the oxygen, trains to everywhere, Filene's Basement.

I am relieved to be back, away from all that was awful. The crowds, the cold wind, the lousy, tiny, overpriced apartments, the beggars, the shark cabs, gentrification and construction. Mostly, the increasingly bad work environment. I have never worked for such incompetent, unfair, entitled managers as I found in the hospitals there. Had I thought I had to stay, I'd have exploded in frustrated disgust. So many good people in such broken systems, always the hard way around any task.

I don't like to admit my difficulties with the more extremes of diversity, but that is part of my discomfort. Bahamian women cackling in French set my teeth on edge. Despite knowing I was invisible to them, not the subject of their scornful mocking loud laughter, my body reacted as though insulted. The Arabic men reeking of baths of perfume, as well as the Europeans, the Italians whose families had been here centuries longer than mine, and some of the other more recently arrived as well. Easily nauseated by artificial odors, this became as intolerable as the stench of smokers, as the car exhaust fumes. Constant confusion with heavy accents, drawer and door are not pronounced identically in my ears. The babel of it turned from bemusement to weary despair after three years. I don't know how people just move to large foreign cities, and live their entire lives there.

Then there is here, White Bread City*. So many Barbie girls, so many returned missionaries, so deep the conformity and safely oblivious choices. The slow drivers (and me driving again after so long) the national chain stores, the sheer shabbiness of the buildings. The heat, the distances. Work is much better, but I am half newbie, half experienced, and those hired since I left treat me as the former. A move to a new place impending, everyone edgy.

I don't fit here, either. I will never fit anywhere. I am homeless to the depths of my soul, save only D, who is the other side. I know this, have known for a long time. I am bothered that it still hurts so. But no small place would want me, either. Nor am I a go-out-to-the-woods-and-hide type.

I want to finish the book, dream of publishing, of one day making a living this way. And I dither as I do so. A hard, steep path, and I have little inclination for the selling of it. So, first, the story. One step, then the next. Sleep tonight, fingers on keyboard tomorrow. Find the local writers' group, attend next gathering.

Mood no good.


*To borrow a convention from Jo(e).