Living As If

I realized today that I'm living as if things mattered. They really don't seem to actually matter, but I'm acting as though they might. Everyone assures me that the important things will matter to me again, but that's hard to imagine. It's sort of like not being able to imagine feeling healthy when you're really sick. There's only an intellectual assertion of the possibility of health, not really a memory of what that felt like.

So, I go to the gym. I swim. I look for a job. I tend to the sad tasks of disentangling my life from my partner of 26 years. And I knit.

Knitting soothes me. I bought some happy blue, green, and yellow self-striping sock yarn and am making a circular baby blanket for my brother and his wife's baby-to-be. (What kind of nut-case makes a baby blanket on size 2 needles??? I'm pleading temporary insanity.) I'm knitting for something. There must be something good happening in the future, and these stitches are marking the passage of time toward that good thing. As long as I'm knitting, hope has a place in my life.