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I don't have to wonder why this time of year always makes me sad. I know.
It's no big thing. But I can't help remembering people I used to know, places I used to love. Things I used to look forward to, like Christmas, I dread for so many small, petty reasons I couldn't count them all. People I used to care for, who I've... misplaced, one way or another, due to time or distance or simple carelessness.
Lately I've been dreaming of a house in the country. Actually dreaming, not daydreaming: a small grey farmhouse in the old style with worn rooms comfortably arranged and a wooden stair, four-pointed stars carved into the risers of the steps, and a kitchen where a cat sleeps on a jumble of shoes in a corner by an Aga cooker. Outside there is a shed half-full of straw, a small paved yard, and beyond, fields green and damp and full of dying gorse under a grey sky sweeping down to the sea. And I know if I went down a narrow hall and opened the door to the living room, it would be full of friends. And I wake up full of regret.
It's happened more than twice now. The house in the dream is nowhere I've ever been. Or rather, it's bits and pieces of a number of places I've been, all mixed together, under a dream of west-of-Ireland scenery and sky. It's the house I wish I could belong to, in the middle of countryside that for all its foreigness to me (I really am more comfortable in towns) still smells like coming home.
I hate that dream only a little less than I hate the fact that I have had it. It seems a little implausible, not to mention impolite, for your own brain to be giving you tastes of things you can never have. Hell, I thought the recurring symbolic dream thingy was a literary invention. It's freaking ridiculous to find out it actually isn't.
And it's really not helping my winter mood of sorrow and old socks and fruitless regrets. Fruitful regrets would be a different thing, but I don't seem to quite do fruitful regrets.
It's the tail end of the (solar) year. Maybe some other year I'll get a sunlamp, mum won't be scheduled for too many shifts over the holidays, and the shops will play choral music instead of hive-inducing cheery jingles. That's the year I'll have a pony, too, and an antidote for some of this tired cynicism. Right?
Here's to the year to come. May it be more just, fairer, and more kind.
It's no big thing. But I can't help remembering people I used to know, places I used to love. Things I used to look forward to, like Christmas, I dread for so many small, petty reasons I couldn't count them all. People I used to care for, who I've... misplaced, one way or another, due to time or distance or simple carelessness.
Lately I've been dreaming of a house in the country. Actually dreaming, not daydreaming: a small grey farmhouse in the old style with worn rooms comfortably arranged and a wooden stair, four-pointed stars carved into the risers of the steps, and a kitchen where a cat sleeps on a jumble of shoes in a corner by an Aga cooker. Outside there is a shed half-full of straw, a small paved yard, and beyond, fields green and damp and full of dying gorse under a grey sky sweeping down to the sea. And I know if I went down a narrow hall and opened the door to the living room, it would be full of friends. And I wake up full of regret.
It's happened more than twice now. The house in the dream is nowhere I've ever been. Or rather, it's bits and pieces of a number of places I've been, all mixed together, under a dream of west-of-Ireland scenery and sky. It's the house I wish I could belong to, in the middle of countryside that for all its foreigness to me (I really am more comfortable in towns) still smells like coming home.
I hate that dream only a little less than I hate the fact that I have had it. It seems a little implausible, not to mention impolite, for your own brain to be giving you tastes of things you can never have. Hell, I thought the recurring symbolic dream thingy was a literary invention. It's freaking ridiculous to find out it actually isn't.
And it's really not helping my winter mood of sorrow and old socks and fruitless regrets. Fruitful regrets would be a different thing, but I don't seem to quite do fruitful regrets.
It's the tail end of the (solar) year. Maybe some other year I'll get a sunlamp, mum won't be scheduled for too many shifts over the holidays, and the shops will play choral music instead of hive-inducing cheery jingles. That's the year I'll have a pony, too, and an antidote for some of this tired cynicism. Right?
Here's to the year to come. May it be more just, fairer, and more kind.