I was wondering when the urge to write would hit. To be honest, it's been a waning desire, which worries me greatly. But it's the kind of worry I've been able to sweep under the carpet most of the time, a skill I unfortunately possess in the most innate of ways.

In any case, inexplicably, hilariously, ridiculously, the urge hit after I danced with my cat. There was a catchy old jazz tune on Radio-Canada and, having noticed her looking up at me with a quizzical look, I spontaneously grabbed her and we danced for most of the song. At least a minute passed until I realized that I was swaying around in circles with a furry partner in front of my window, completely enjoying the moment in a lost-in-thought kind of way. I realized how strange it could appear, and how it the sweetness of the moment also paradoxically exposed the loneliness and boredom that has surrounded me most of this weekend. Felled with a cold and stuck alone at home, I've been quietly anxious and unsettled. And now, driven to dancing with my cat! Oh my. I had visions of myself as being a pathetic part of Hitchcox's Rear Window cast of misfits. And then, oddly, I decided to write.

I'm crawling out of my skin with this cold. The stuffy nose, the headache, the chills, the fatigue, they feel like a series of mini-deaths I'm being made to suffer through. It has made me miserable and self-pitying and dark. I can hear a resounding echo around me, void of meaning or warmth or affection. And then the hell of being aware of that echo, hating that echo, yet slipping further and futher into a void that only magnifies it. Hopefully I will climb out of this canyon once my health improves, because my friends, it is a stark and desolate place in there. A place where your unfulfilled dreams are paraded in front of you in the cruellest of ways, in neverending heap after soggy heap. My beloved bed is longer a safe haven of rest and relaxation, but a violent current where my most difficult memories and strangest fears come to pay a visit. I save myself with music, the one and only thing that serves a strong enough distraction from all of this. And so I dance, with a cat, I dance!