Books and life

I read a book today...

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I swallowed it; devouring pages, choking on the sentences, gulping air in between carefully crafted words and phrases.

It was a difficult book.  A fact that didn't escape my notice back when I first lifted it off the shelf.  The bland description on the back cover hinted, oh so beguilingly, at unseen horrors within and yet the calm and serene cover seemed to promise restitution.  Read me, it seemed to whisper, you may suffer in the process but all will be well in the end.

Seduced by the lovely prose and by the implied promise of happily ever after I picked it up and began to read.

There is no happily ever after.  Just as life tends to provide questions rather than answers, so did this book.  The horror within blossomed, dark and incomprehensible, made all the more poignantly personal by the child's name... Kate. Reading it was like walking along the precipice, knowing you're going to slip down into the yawning abyss but hoping you're wrong.  And as the book unfolded you would admit to yourself that you aren't wrong.

I'd like to say that the book was ultimately uplifting, that it brought comfort and deliverance along with its exquisite pain, but that would be inventing my own ending.

As most good books do, this one left richly painted and complex characters suffering in the wake of the last page closing.  What made it so solid and real is precisely why there could be no happy resolution, no neat tying up of loose ends, no promise of absolute answers. 

Real life carries no promises of happy resolutions to our own personal versions of hell and this book was nothing less than real in all its terrifying and inexplicable monstrosity.

A "not good" day...

This will not be a good day...

I can already feel it and it's not even 10am. My skin feels prickly with dread of a wasted heap of hours before me. I keep catching myself tightening my jaws and grinding my teeth and the fact that I keep doing it is irritating me, leading to more tightening and grinding.

My hands are shaky and want to be let loose on the keyboard but whatever I let them type today will be drivel and I hold them back, feeling prickly irritation flow from the fingertips up through the arms. My shoulders are tense and the worst part of all, the way I know for certain that this will not be a good day is that I can feel my collar.

Usually it's a comfort, a reassuring metal band locked around my neck, heavy enough to stay put, light enough to never remove. But on days like today, I can feel it tightening, pressing on my throat. It isn't, of course it isn't. It's just me, it's the tension, the straining of muscles that makes the skin hypersensitive and turns the collar from a comforting presence into a choking warning to relax.

Except that I can't relax. I don't know what's bothering me, but it's getting worse by the minute and it'll keep getting worse, crushing all my attempts at concentration on my reading or my chores or anything else I would normally be doing today. Music isn't helping, coffee isn't helping, being in a place I love is having no effect. It's the fight or flight tension except I can't pick which one I want to do. And I don't think either one will help.

This will not be a good day.