Black Cloud

I’ve been sleeping a lot.

I know – you thought I was off, maybe jet setting somewhere glamorous and totally awesome. But I’m not. I’m sleeping. You can dial down your jealousy now. (Don’t burst my bubble and tell me you just thought I was off watching Friends marathons and eating Doritos. Which would be true. You know me well.)

I come home. I eat a snack. I play with the dogs. Then I pretend I’ve accidentally fallen asleep until Husband gets home, but really it was my plan all along. Then I eat dinner and I go back to bed and I wake up for work too late to do anything with myself – not that I’ve bothered doing anything with myself for some time. Then I exist at work and count down the hours until I can hide with a puppy under my covers again.

Other than some general discontent with my job, I can’t even exactly tell you what’s wrong. And even the job stuff isn’t that bad, because I have a job, and mama knows it could be worse, child. Mama knows.

It’s just been one long stretch of time where I feel like the universe is moving against me in small ways, ways possibly only noticeable to me. You know how it goes. The ten thousand little things that go wrong, that you know are just random but you can’t shake the idea that maybe you’re being punished for something you don’t remember doing. Being personally attacked for wrongs in a past life.

I slept through my alarm this morning.

I picked up my coffee before screwing the lid on, and I spilled it all over my kitchen.

I’d been avoiding Olympic women’s gymnastics spoilers all day, only to have a coworker shout the gold-medal winner to another coworker. Literally no one has said anything about the Olympics the entire time it’s been on until this one thing I was waiting for.

I got stuck at work late and had to run, literally run, to catch my train on time.

I know I’m prone to catastrophe and why-me-ing, darkness and pessimism. I can see ill will in every benign action. I can turn a small blip into an anxious nightmare. However, I have gotten pretty good at handling myself over the years. Developing ways to deal with the crazy. So, since I was by a window on the train, I tried to calm myself down by sort of meditating on the train tracks running parallel. Something to focus on that was a consistent movement. Something to shut my mind down and slow my heart rate. And for no reason whatsoever, we switched to the other train tracks, so they were no longer on my side.

Small things pile up, each stupid burden adding pounds of woe until you find yourself crying in the kitchen because the butter to make your chocolate chip cookies isn’t soft enough yet, like, my God, will you ever catch a break. And then you hate yourself, because are you really crying about cookies? And all you want to do is say fuck the cookies and take the bag of chocolate chips under the covers with the puppy. But you don’t.

You wait for the butter and you make the stupid cookies because eventually you have to pull yourself out of it.

And cookies really help with that.