I love my new apartment — really, truly, I do — but, as you might imagine, the last week + change has been a very rollercoaster-y ride of emotions, for reasons both obvious and not. And it’s for that reason that I am VERY MUCH looking forward to escaping Nashville for a few days to (potentially – hopefully?) bore myself in Mountain Home. On my agenda for my time there? Besides the obvious Christmas festivities, I am planning on spending gobs of time staring off into space and, probably, writing furiously… e-mails, scribbles in notebooks, maybe even some {gasp} research.
Incidentally, this will be my first Christmas in Mountain Home without dragging someone else (friend or otherwise) along in … hmmm. Gosh. Let’s just avoid that math, okay?
It will come to no surprise to many of you that I crave companionship. While I am an introvert and need a good deal of alone time and personal space, I nevertheless yearn to be psychically close to others — and by “others,” I generally mean “one or two people.” I have been (I’m sure) annoying the hell out of a couple of poor souls who have become those “one or two people” for me in the last couple of weeks. (In particular, I feel Jeff deserves a special shout-out for talking me down off many, many ledges — perhaps more than he even realizes!)
I think the hardest thing about the last week, then, has just been how gosh-darn *lonely* I have felt. I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming… but there you have it.
I am hoping that a week (or probably longer) in Mountain Home will do me much good. I don’t really plan to spend much time in Nashville over the break, and hope that coming back right as the spring semester begins (which by all accounts should be MUCH MUCH more demanding on me) will help me avoid the soul-crushing loneliness… by simple virtue of the fact that I’ll be in classes again and have tons of reading (but not writing, at least not right away) to do.
Today was a very difficult day. It began, as my less-than-awesome days so often do, with not much sleep… which tends to shorten my fuse, fray my nerves, and generally make everything more difficult to deal with right off the bat. I haven’t felt so completely spazzy in years. For everyone who was subjected to my utter spazziness today, please accept my heartfelt apologies. This is not me. I will find a way out of this. I will. I WILL.
And I will begin with a good night’s sleep, aided by Advil PM (the nectar of the well-rested gods) and the warm, if not slightly needy, presence of Rags, who in a moment of selfish weakness, I agreed to let sleep on the bed tonight. Lucky damned dog.