Bucket List

I woke to the gentle sound of rain pattering against the windows, and lay under my weighted blanket for almost an hour in the cool dark of my bedroom.

Finally, rain.

I have been craving rain for weeks, every day that it hasn't been raining, which has been most of them. Eventually, I get up.

It's a slow morning, as I'd planned. I eat my breakfast, make tea, then a decaf latte. I make my bed, and then scroll Instgram on my computer for a minute. I rarely keep the app on my phone. I stumble across a page of humorous quips about adulting, and start giggling uncontrollably. I send a few to my family members, whom I doubt find them as funny as me, but still, I have to share.

All of the sudden, my giggles turn hysteric, and then, I start to sob.

This is what adulting looks like for me: I go days, weeks, months, numb and wondering if I am broken or dead inside, if I am no longer capable of Emotions, as a thirty-something. Did I outgrow them somewhere along the line?

But inevitably, they come to me. Just unexpectedly. Sometimes inconveniently. Often in the middle of the night, shocking me from deep slumber. I sit up in bed and scream into my pillow, hoping I'm not waking the neighbors.

Lately, it's been like this: laughter turns hysterical, turns to sobs that don't allow breathing room.

I sit down, rendered incapable of doing anything other than that.

When I am spent, I lay on my makeshift couch and admire the rain, the gentle swaying curtains in the breeze.

Then I go to my mat and begin my yoga practice. An hour on the mat in devotion to life, self, other.

I get up, draw a bath, sink my self into the steaming water, watch the bath bomb froth under the surface, breathe slowly. I shampoo my hair, chase the bar of soap around the tub, rinse off in hot, then cold water, anoint myself in rose absolute and neroli.

It's raining harder, and it soothes my soul.

I write a poem about love and photosynthesis.

I hope that if I keep writing poetry, I can find everything I left behind circa 2008.

The rain ends, and the chilly air wafts in through my windows, curtains billowing out. I wrap up in a blanket and look out the window, listen to the birds continue their song, and think 'It's okay not to make sense. It's okay to be an island.'

I wonder if there's something wrong with me for not being able to discern what I want.

The future is as indiscernable as a cocophany of green highway signs strung up before me, as convaluted as an algebraic formula. It's like a brick wall, two inches from my face. A cliff's edge.

What is it in other people that makes them know what they want, and makes them want things they can have, and gives them the energy to go after those at least mildly-attainable things?

'It's okay to not belong here.'

But my bucket list is alive and well, however short: I would like to be something other than solitary, before I die.