I don’t know.
I’ve been in a weird place lately.
Not depressed, but…susceptible. Yes I think susceptible is the exact word I need.
Maybe it’s the fact that we had a couple days of spring—just enough to get me thinking about busting out the flip flops—and then got catapulted back into winter, just BAM.
Maybe it’s all the crap happening in Japan and [enter country here].
Maybe it’s that I haven’t had time to write and get it all out like I normally do.
Or maybe it’s that I’m in my hundredth trimester and this pregnancy is really starting to bug me.
I’m like, eating chocolate all the time. Seriously all the time. Could be all the extra weight I’ve put on that’s, well, weighing me down.
Things have been weird with PK lately (not like divorce weird, just cabin fever type get out of my hair with the spousal stuff weird {me get out of his hair, not he mine}). It seems like when one of us is grouchy the other is cheerful, and vice versa, but never at the same time (well, we’re often grouchy at the same time but not so much simultaneously happy). I guess that could be a different post in itself. Or a different couple’s therapy session. (Don’t laugh; I’ve been considering it.)
But and so I’ve been keenly sensitive these days, both to marital discord and to sundry other sad things.
Like, for example, at the bowling alley on Saturday night (don’t ask), there was this guy, this old guy, probably 75 or so, who sauntered in with his own gear—shiny shoes, hand powder, sweatbands, and not one but two of his own personal bowling balls each with its own leather stubby-handled custom bag—around 8:45 p.m.
He reserved his own lane, the one next to ours, and proceeded to make quite a show of practicing. Bowling. All alone. On a Saturday night. The peak time for bowling alley busy-ness (which, why do bowling alleys EVER have busy times is what I want to know, but don’t mind me I’m just the pissy girl in the corner).
Jeff—that’s the name he typed into his score screen (yes, he fully typed his own name into the score screen despite the fact that he was the only one who was using the thing)—was actually pretty good, but that just seemed even sadder to me. Like he came to the bowling alley on a Saturday night when he knew it would be crowded so that people would watch him bowl and maybe someone would talk to him about how good he was at bowling. Like as in he was probably paying $30 an hour to rent that lane because it was worth it to him for its inherent conversation potential. Like he was willing to pay for the chance that someone might actually talk to him, maybe the only conversation he would have since he went bowling last Saturday night. Be good at fishing. Be good at knitting, or metal-detecting, or gardening—it’s supposed to be solitary. But please, Jeff, don’t be good at bowling. Bowling and movie-going and chess and Caribbean cruises and three-legged races are strictly off-limit entertainments when you’re alone and eighty. Don’t be so freaking good at bowling, Jeff; you’re killing me.
After sitting for a few minutes next to what was easily the most depressing sight I’d seen all month (I guess not counting Japan, but in truth it was pretty high up there with Japan, emotion-wise, for me), the twist of despair in my heart became so intense that if there’d been any sort of illicit drugs nearby, and if I’d known what to do with them, I would’ve consumed them, OD’d probably, just to escape the pain of it all.
Because that’s what life comes to, doesn’t it? All of us—you, me, Jeff—will end up half-dead and bowling alone someday.
And the worst part is that I can’t even think of a bright-side resolution to this post.
Because there is no resolution.
This’s all there is.
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