fog on the road home

One of my happiest friends told me last year that she had been diagnosed with a long-running depression. But instead of the type that keeps you in bed, she has a nervous variety, the kind that keeps you constantly moving... running, I suppose, from those gravity-thoughts that put lead in your shoes. At first, I had a hard time accepting this about her but here, in my own manic state lately, I've started to get a sense of what she meant. Going out almost every night, not reading much, my new room still in disarray. And tonight, leaving work, I didn't want to go home alone to an empty house. I wanted to text every person I know and ask where they were, so I could join and continue on. This is, in some ways, a joie de la vivre. But, in others, and in a way I know well, this is also a form of running, when really, I should be grounding.

Nothing here is new or unpredicted. I knew in moving to Austin that I would go through a series of phases, including some deeper, darker recesses that would be difficult to look at. I would see my short-comings, join groups I didn't really belong in, make stupid decisions, say stupid things, go through whole chunks of life with blinders on, and miss whole days dreaming about stuff that would never actually happen... you know, blunder. And I would do it relatively alone, and that would mean something.

As I was curving up the hills towards my new apartment, thinking about who to write and who to join, a patch of fog crossed the road. Subtle and gray and thin, nothing outwardly phenomenal. But with it, somehow, came a deep breath and this sudden image of being a girl watching her own movie. And whereas this watching is not as valuable as living my own movie forefront, I understood that this brief patch of objectivity is a phase, as with anything.

Like in Zen Buddhism where they say: you first see that there are mountains, and then you realize there are no mountains, then you can see mountains again. You are in your movie, you are watching your movie, then you are in your movie again, aware. You know where your toes are, and how your hands grip the wheel, and you experience, just for a few precious seconds in time, what a thin, gray fog can feel like on your fingers and the breeze on your arm out the window, dipping and riding the evening air.