(dis)content

I take pleasure in toasting an English muffin each morning and swiping it with softened French butter and whipped cream cheese festooned with chives. I sit at my breakfast table or over the countertop in the kitchen and enjoy it, a few stolen moments of ecstasy.

I’m in a rut, but I’m in denial that I am. But then everything feels like a rut when you wake up one morning at 36 years old and realize that all the dreams you’ve had were never met or that you compromised them or that you wasted them away getting drunk every night as a means to assuage heartbreaks. I thought there was something poetic in the way I could drink an entire bottle of Pinot Noir while mourning an almost-love.

There is a model telling to my life. So much exposition and no meaningful climax. I walk the same streets everyday. In college, it was State Street. After college, it was the same park ad nauseam, now it’s the Old Dixie Highway all the way to Gulfstream with occasional sojourns to Atlantic Avenue and barely kissing the ocean. Except I like it when I can be just below the friction, because I’ve been burned so many times I find getting too close to the white heat of human exposure too traumatic, so I evade it.

I’m re-reading The White Album, it’s been some time since I last did. I like reading it with fresh eyes, love reading it without the cacophony of a hangover. It got warm again, but there’s always a cold front in the morning. That’s what Florida winters are like: a mild cold front and the knife’s edge of barometric pressure bearing down on people’s heads because we’re all so close to the ocean, but by the afternoon, the tropical heat comes back and the headaches evaporate while the iguanas saunter out from underneath the fronds of the palm trees.

I fell asleep last night certain that true love for me was never in the cards and I woke up this morning with a bittersweetness outlining my pillow.