itis

What ails me? Anon. And.

I diagnose: at 40 I fretted; at the bend into 48 I’m nigh unrecognizable. Grown fat and slow with middle age. Chris shot a video at some odd moment of me washing dishes. I came across it on my phone and thought, Who is that woman? 

If only to write as of yore, sans excruciating restraint and parsing. I’d like to say, and know, just what I mean. Like that.

There is of course nostalgia, o, folly. The sheer volume of things and people I miss weights me, clots mental teeth. Perhaps most poignantly those which do not deserve the missing. I crave what’s past with tenacious melancholy. No roses while lived but rouged by distance.

Just so, this time, one day, will feel different, stripped of pain and retouched with the tinge of retrospect. I thrust myself forward in a concise act of imagination to that distant moment to feel it differently, and almost can for a moment. Just a glimpse of forecast hindsight.

It relieves uncomfortable stretches of the insistent present, in which it’s hard to sit still, hard to stand. Aches abloom in joints that worked fine previously. Oil can, squeaks the imagination.

That woman at the sink, remember her? A balloon she may be, yet not altogether untethered. Tugging in the wind.