Sweeping Up

I've come here several times in the past few days thinking that I would have something to say, that if I opened a new post, something witty or clever or even trivial would appear to fill this little blank box, satisfy the demand of the blinking cursor, but each time, I've closed the entry and gone to other things, to Tumblr where I can express myself through images and quotations, to work on a writing project (because, good God, I'm actually producing again...I guess the words just will come out of me somewhere), to read the words of others, because my capacity to put anything here has been as limited as my current appetite for food.

In other words, it seems that I want nothing.

The drive that used to call me here almost compulsively to share my thoughts is empty at the moment.  What shall I tell you?  What would you have me give?  What is there to say that has not already been said?  I feel like the janitorial staff coming out at the end of a major production to find that a member of the audience has not departed but is still sitting front row center waiting for another act to unfold.  I am standing on stage with my broom, the house lights are all up, and I'm forced to lean across the footlights and whisper to you, "What else is it you expect to see here tonight?  Go home.  Go home to the people who love you.  To the people you love.  The show is over.  There are no more shocks or horrors left here.  All the performers are gone now.  All their mysteries are done."

And maybe that, too, would be a kind of performance after all if somebody paid attention, the action of a trouper who had to do double-duty, who had to clean up after her turn in the revels was over.  But I'm still a little off-kilter right now, still trying to figure out what to do with what I've learned this week, and while I know that it really doesn't matter to anybody else but me (and maybe to a few precious ones of you who I am more thankful for than I can say), I'm not really up to resuming my little performances here, I suppose.

For those of you to whom I am just an interesting curiosity, just a thing of clockwork and puzzlement, click back in a few days or weeks as your whimsy leads you.  I am sure your usual service of loud-sounding nothings, of sound and fury, will resume.  For those of you who worry, well... Patience.  Patience.  As the heart-rendingly beautiful Marco once told me in Florence, "These things, they happen."