It‘s happening again. I call them doughnut days, days when I feel something’s missing. That something is the center.
I remember my favorite book, Hopscotch, and that phrase about looking for a center. Those are the doughnut days, when you feel something missing, when the banalities of everyday life, the ones that give a temporary sensory overload that mimics a center wash away and leave you breathlessly empty.
I look around, with that familiar sense o f un-belonging Must be the weather: this feeling froze during the snowstorms and now I thaws, bringing with it the usual, diaphanous certitude that for all it’s worth, it is worthless.
Days like this I try something different to make me feel better. Today, I will eat a doughnut. It sits here, close to my right hand, ready to be devoured. The center is almost closed with sugar and coconut bits, but it’s still there, a hole in the middle, the gravitational apparatus that keep the doughnut together. Close it and it’s no longer a doughnut. It’s something else, like me, without a center.
Other days I drink more alcohol, or drink more coffee. Used to be writing was my center, the one thing that would bring me some peace. But now the other aspects of life swirl irresponsibly around my shortened attention span, and even writing lags behind. Even reading. I hadn’t read a book in a long time. I picked this one up at Barnes and Noble. “Italian Shoes” by some Scandinavian author. So far it is dark and depressing, ominous really, something about settling old scores, something about keeping old promises.
Maybe that’s my emptiness, broken promises.
But my coffee gets cold, and the doughnut want to be eaten.
Back to the hole, like the groundhog.
Six more weeks of darkness.
