Minus the 12-hour workdays, I still feel like I’m on vacation. I wake up so early that I have plenty of leisure time for a run before 8am. My route ends on the same corner as normal and I stand for a few seconds before turning and running the extra two blocks back to my starting point. Then there is the unfamiliar shower and rummaging through boxes and bags for an outfit. I’ve verbally been blaming my laziness but the truth is that I don’t want to unpack; it would mean settling in and I want to hold on to my nomadicity for as long as possible.
Leaving the boxes behind, I’m enjoying the outside weather with my current book of choice: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts by Sylvia Plath. Although I just purchased the book last year, I’ve had the quote from the back cover written in my high school notebook since I first discovered SP when I was sixteen:
“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination…If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.”
She’s not the greatest role model, to be sure, but midst her somewhat disturbed prose, there are lines like these:
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m as neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
And, simply enough, this quote is probably why I love SP: “There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.”
In closing, as I set off to finish that dreaded grad school essay over the lunch hour, I echo her prayer: Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.
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