I've been sad a lot recently.
Not depressed, that only lasted for the first day after he left when I was so immobilized by his departure that I couldn’t even roll over in bed to turn on my laptop until I finally had to because I needed to email to tell him that I missed him so much I could ‘feel it in my bones.’ Um, yeah.
Anyway, that’s not what it’s like now. Now it’s like I’m totally fine, standing in front of my booth at the farmers’ market, asking yuppies if they would like to sample an organic strawberry grown in Wenatchee, when I suddenly have to put down my sunglasses so that no one can tell that my eyes have started watering.
These moments can happen in public (like the above) but they come with more frequency when I am just lying around in bed, listening to some songs, so I’ve decided to actually be proactive about making that not be my life. I tried drinking to excess as a substitute, because in the past that has been a very effective method of making myself not feel sad, but a couple nights ago it was still pretty horrible when I was a couple of bottles of wine in and smoking secret cigarettes alone in my parents’ backyard.
So now I’ve decided to be an artist. I mean, not really an artist. Here’s what happened: I walked six miles (round trip) to this art store and then dropped $35 on fancy markers and now I have been going to parks and doing drawings, but also drinking to excess and doing drawings. What I had initially envisioned was kind of a Maira Kalman type situation where I wrote witty and somewhat self deprecating and beautiful things next to off-kilter drawings but what has actually happened is that I drew my friend a picture of a dinosaur dreaming about an ice cream sundae whilst sitting on a beach, and then I drew some pictures for him of me selling fruit at the farmers’ market, and also a block of singing apartment buildings.
He called last night, right before he went to sleep, as I was driving home slightly drunk and slightly stoned after an evening on a friend’s porch and he told me about formal wear in Burkina Faso and the acceptability of sweatiness in Africa and my feelings about him being laptopless and how my fear of bicycle riding would be prohibitive of me joining the Peace Corps. When he finally headed to bed, I was still in the car and some songs were playing because they are the only song that are ever playing in my life right now.
The other day I had something to say about good places to cry. I was right about that, but here is the actual number one crying situation: Something is sad and something is beyond your control and you are driving at night listening to songs about that thing at such a volume that you can’t even hear your own sobs which are at that severe point where they almost feel like dry heaving.
It’s even better than drawing.
