Januaryness

It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task.  ~Virgil


In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
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The holidays are over, their glitter and bright lights gone.  The days are short, the nights are cold, and it won't stop raining.  I hate January.  There's nothing good in January.  It is a despicable month.  It gets a lot of press as a "new beginning," but underneath that thin gilt veneer is a rusted-out base metal that is a lot closer to the truth of things.

Because of the pay schedule I'm on, my last check came the 16th of December, and I won't see another dime until January 30th.  I am scrimping and saving, but my money is already almost gone, and the January bills are rolling in, piling up, making me sick as I try to figure out how to take care of them.

The ground outside is sodden.  Even on high ground, when I step through my yard to walk my dogs, that uneasy softness shifts and slides.  The sky is perpetually grey, dull, just like I feel.  When there is sunshine, it is almost an unbearable but wonderful brightness, like something that I heard about it a story once but stopped believing was real long ago.

The dark, bleak nothing wraps its fist around my heart, and as I look around me, everything I see is colored by it.  Maybe it's more right to say that the color is leeched away by it.  In any case, everything I see makes me sad and filled with discontent.

The city I live and work in has nothing, does nothing, it seems except produce coffins in which to lay to rest my students and former students.  Former gains disappear.  Bright spots and efforts fail and disappear.  Friends in other places tell me of things that they get to do, and the dismal cloud chokes me hard.

My dreams are bad.  People die.  Things are lost.  Situations that are unwinnable are constant.  There's never a moment of peace.  I wake up tired.

My head hurts all the time.  My stomach is constantly upset.  I don't know what to do or how to stop it.  Maybe it's something I'm eating or not eating.  Maybe it's just stress.

I would run away, but there is nowhere to run to.  I would dream of something better, but I'm fresh out of silly notions with which to distract myself.  I would immerse myself in some hobby, but they all either need money or some motivation that I can't seem to scrape up at the present.

And maybe I'll be all better tomorrow.  I can certainly hope so.  I just have a feeling that this will be with me until January is gone.