Bookstore Melancholia
I went to the bookstore after work today. Something about that environment can make me quite…wistful. Remembering other times, when I had other friends. Friends who loved reading like I do, friends who were intellectual and cosmopolitan and well-read and well-spoken. I miss that. When I lived in Amsterdam I had a group of people that I hung out with - not really friends-friends, but hang-out friends. And we were all young and single, well I wasn’t technically but just as good as. And we hung out in this easy, chilled out way that I didn’t realize would disappear as I aged. Now it’s all a huge labor to get together with people with sitters and custody schedules and people’s bad backs and shit. And it’s mostly because *I* haven’t changed, and those concerns aren’t my concerns that I miss it. I feel like I got off-track in the growing up process somewhere, though I don’t know quite how. I’ve always felt out of step with my peers - too old when I was younger, and now too young when I am older. I don’t feel thirty-five soon to be thirty-six. That seems so impossibly old and unhappy an age. I don’t feel like a full-time worker and a home owner with all her student loans paid off. I don’t feel like that person. And at the same time I keep thinking that I have not accomplished near enough to be reaching this age. No kids, no spouse, none of the things other people use as life markers. Even if I don’t want those things the lack of them makes me feel totally inadequate. All the beginning of my life lived in such a rush to get away from things, and now I am back-pedalling madly, unwilling to go gently into the good night of my late-30’s without something to brandish at the world defiantly as proof of my worth.
I was listening to the audio book of Magic Study, and I didn’t want to listen to the end yet. I didn’t want to waste it on a weeknight when I was tired and distracted, so I thought I would get another book to fill the time until tonight. I got a book called Dirty by Megan Hart. I bought it because it was on sale, it said it had hot sex, and it was nice and long. Short audiobooks always make me feel as if I got ripped off somehow. Anyway, the beginning had such graphic sex that even I was a bit taken aback. But as the story unfolds you begin to understand why it begins as it does. And now I only have 90 minutes of that book left, and I don’t want to finish it either! And I am sad that I will never have anyone in my life like the protaganist’s love interest in this book. Someone who would care enough to get to know you despite your bluster and insulation, someone who persists when you push away. Someone who looks at you and sees what you want when you don’t mean to show it but want it seen anyway. Are there people like that? If there are I don’t know that I will ever know one. And thus the melancholia. The longing for at least a feeling of comraderie with others, that even though they don’t know me that well we all share a common something. Being young and goofy and lost. And that being OK because no one expected more of us and we didn’t expect more of ourselves. That’s not what I have now, I have carpets to steam and groceries to buy and a mortgage to pay. And it’s really quiet here in a way that I love and loving it makes me sad.
It’s raining hard tonight, good for the garden, bad for the mosquito-level tomorrow I suspect. The crape myrtles are in bloom and my giant Celosia looks as if it will bloom soon. The flowers were supposed to be 10″, so I will certainly photograph and share that if it’s true.
One Response to “Bookstore Melancholia”
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Heidi on
July 28, 2007 9:00 pm
Now you know why those losers on thirty-something were all so effed up. :lol:
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