Other Words for Restless

I heard the cicadas for the first time while taking out the trash after dinner. I know it’s been a year and more but I forget until something comes around again. Here we are, I think, tossing another bag in the can.

Joy comes in minuscule amounts: the sun warming my shoulders as I cross the yard to take strawberry tops to the chickens; my three-year-old climbing into my arms after I’ve helped him get dressed.

The things I daydream about now are too close to achievable. Brass candlesticks, a Babaà sweater. I keep coming back to books about breathwork, golden hued anointing oils in glass bottles, guided journals that I want to believe will help me arrive at some kind of answer. All of these things can be had with a credit card, some mindless clicking and, depending on how the post office is running, a few days or weeks to wait. It’s unclear to me if this is what I really want or if I’ve forgotten how to want greater things.  

In the afternoons I make milky tea and sit at my desk in front of the windows with my notebook open. There is a direct corollary between my mental health and the amount of time I spend journaling, writing just to write, to feel my hand move across the page.

“That bad, huh?” my husband quips when he finds me sitting there, hours later, while the preschooler floods his sandbox with the garden hose and the dog stands by, ready for it. 

Every day the three-year-old collects cups at his spot at the kitchen table, and so at the end of the day I sweep up at least 5, plus the water bottle he is supposed to drink water out of to cut down on the usage of cups. I am tired of running the dishwasher, which I do, sometimes three times a day.

Meanwhile, his older brother litters the table with orange peels and scraps of paper. He has recently taken to drawing on printer paper with a black Crayola marker, he calls it “paper work” and it delights me.

Here we are, I think, at the end of the day, when their bedroom doors stay closed and the house is dark. 

I try to catch the second the sky turns pink as the sun sets but most of the time I miss it.