Monday morning. Two days to get everything done that needs to be done before I go to Oxford on Wednesday.
Life is all ups and downs lately. I felt very bleak for a while yesterday, but it doesn’t take much to cheer me up again. Funny old life. It was showery, so I spent most of the day indoors – and hence, on the computer (though I also did housework and cooking) - rather than in the garden. I even managed to write a scene for my novel. I made myself sit and write it, almost 700 words, though it was a bit of a struggle and I don’t think it’s very good. It’s an important scene, a big, dramatic, climactic one. Now that’s done – even if it’s only in draft form – will it make it easier, will it free me up to get on with the rest?
I’ve been on this journey for so long, and I wonder whether the end will be worth it, even if I ever actually reach it. Maybe it would be a huge best seller and give me the independence I keep saying I crave? Or maybe not. Life drifts, it is still drifting. I sit here, surrounded by books, I gaze around me at the shelves and see the card I bought with a picture of the Eiffel Tower: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’. Well, maybe not strictly correct. I do do things I regret sometimes, but they’re little things, thinking specifically of something I’ve done recently which stopped me from doing something I really wanted to, so what does that count as?
To write and let the words out. I keep coming back to this. Letting them out, catching them, which is it? Hmmm. ‘Letting them out’, I think. Feeling them roll around inside my head, banging against the inside of my skull. But yesterday I was trying to catch them. That was hard.
I should make a list of all the things that need to be done today and tomorrow. But then I will get away and leave the lists behind – and though it’s only to Oxford and not exactly glamorous, still it will be nice to get away and be with different people again, rather than here, day after day. Not that I don’t appreciate the people whom I ‘meet’ when I’m here. But it’s hardly the same, and it doesn’t feel terribly healthy. I worry that I need to get a life. When was the last time I actually went out with friends, while I was here, at home, rather than off on my travels? I have the show, my Wednesday evening rehearsals, but I don’t go to the pub afterwards, I don’t hang around with the others. Maybe I should – maybe I will. But I won’t be there for the next couple of weeks, anyway.
There’s an old friend who recently got back in touch, I should call her, am I going to leave her dangling, let it slide, let her drift away again? So many friends I have carelessly let go of down the years, for want of reaching out, of making that contact.
Maybe I’ll call her today.