there's a little black spot on the sun today

It's official: my day job might just be making me crazy. Good bye, somewhat-defined sense of reality, it was nice knowing you.

What drives a girl to such a state? Maybe it's the hum of the artificial air conditioning pumped through shiny exposed round drum pipes above my head. Poor lighting tepidly illuminating my dim cubicle where I have no view of windows. Brick behind me, a stainless steel wall. My grey-beige, color-so-bland-it's-not-really-a color cubicle walls are dotted with postcards from the ones I miss, forever. Look, the Brooklyn brownstones I left behind! A painting of a blue damselfly, freshly flown from my left foot. A Peter Sis painting of a man and a cat crossing Charles Bridge. Ljubljana at sunset, where the madness first began. My friend's drawing of a newly budding spring tree with a moon full and pregnant amongst its branches. And, most importantly, a smiling picture of my friend j's one and a half year old baby, because, no matter how frustrated I get, I can never, ever, throw any negativity out into the world while looking at her sweet wise smiling baby face.

Slowly, parts of me start to close off. I surf the web idly in between making phone calls. Trying to help potential students fulfill their dreams, but the vast majority of them are disinterested at best. Tumid apathy, men and bits of paper. That's where I start to crack, you see. While my co workers talk about boys and tanning beds and sales at New York and Company, while they spray fake butter on their food and make popcorn because it's one of the few foods allowed on their diets, while another one eats only popsicles during the day so she can get as drunk as possible at the baseball game that night, parts of me shut down, wink out, one by one like city lights. But the rest can't stop channeling poetry. TS Eliot lines flap around in my brain like laundry on a clothesline, clean and brilliant, snapping in the sunlight that I can't feel here. My coworkers already think it's weird that I bring the Economist to work and read it just for fun. What would they think if they knew that I sat and poured over Tennyson, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, and Hafiz in between the mundanities of this waking working life.

Something's ready to break open in me. When I do shut off my computer at the end of a work day, eyes shot from staring at the computer screen, legs cramped from remaining immobile behind a desk, I want to shake back into waking and explode into action as soon as possible. Take to the streets, grab my bike, Kid Blue, and go adventuring! Spend an evening in the rock climbing gym, lats and forearms and abs engaged, dangling by a string like a marionette or descending spider, swinging back and forth like Peter Pan, falling and falling over and over and grinning from the exertion and the sweat and the streaks of white chalk across my arms.

I fly back to Prospect Park and a hillside overlooking the lake. White and pink petals fall around me, and inside...peace. Surety. Ferns lick my face like kitten tongues and I hover like a hawk over the acoustic stage, day stage. Looking down from the top of the scaffold that I will help build in a few months, thinking that it can't come quickly enough.