Today* marks the end of my most horrible week of the new year. (I hope this statement will be valid in the end of 2015, too.) I was sick (it took me four days to get better without medication which, in fact, is not so bad, at all), terribly busy and, because of the first two things, depressed. I decided to quit one of my jobs and warned my supervisor about my intentions by a long, emotional and explanatory email. In the end, I didn’t understand what happened but I think that the school was left with the impression that everything was all right and I wasn’t quitting anymore.
I myself have left the solving of this issue for some other time. By then I need to find the answer to the question whether I really can’t go to work. Can you really live a good life without putting 100% of yourself in everything? Am I really not able to be an English teacher?
If I had to make myself a self-portrait now, I’d uproot a flower, I’d put it on the kitchen table and I’d photograph it instead of myself. (But I have to get it from Kaufland, it’s winter.)
The worst thing is that I don’t know why the lack of roots hurts. Didn’t I decide a long time ago that I was one of those dry bushes which roll across the dusty American motorways with some phlegmatic music made by one guitar string on the background? Agamonitsa and the wind, right? Has the time I can spend lingering shortened too much? Or maybe it’s not doing sports? Or, the worst, there’s no reason?
So many questions… so many days until spring comes…
Today I read a beautiful thing on Facebook (just after I read about a petition in the memory of a girl used as a bomb):
“Universe always gives us the answers, it’s us who must learn patience. One day all pieces of the puzzle fit together and every yearning is satisfied. When a hole opens in our soul, this is not necessarily a lack or a loss; it’s a space which is preparing to accept something new and wonderful… some day, tomorrow or even today.” (author unknown)
I decide to believe in this.
I know I have no patience.
The only thing left to believe is that the hole is really a space getting freed up.
It must be!
Otherwise, I speak Czech. However strange it may seem, I did this almost all the time the last couple of days. A friend of mine says that’s the key to blend in here. I really hope it’s just this and not drinking beer, too, although a little more alcohol than none at all surely makes life better. At least that’s what I was told by a drunk guy in Most who I chatted with last Friday night. He said he wasn’t able to fall asleep unless he drank. He works at a warehouse; when he doesn’t work he’s in the pub. In the summer he goes to Egypt with his mother and sister and spends the whole days diving. Every year.
There’s so much sadness in this world. Lately, especially, it’s been so much that it even makes me an optimist. I’m happy I’m not in its centre. There’s so much happiness, too! Too bad I’m not in its centre, either.
One day this horrible week I opened the door of the bedroom into the corridor and I got scared. Something hit me violently. Something I hadn’t seen for a long time. Sunlight. I looked at myself in the mirror – I looked so different. Does the sun really change so many things?
Then it might be (just) this? And everything is a matter of… spring.
*The original post (in Bulgarian) was written on 18 January.)
a blog about (making sense of) life 