I’ve always needed quiet to be able to think. Let’s try it this way for once. Music so loud I feel sick in my gut. Thinking hasn’t done much for me lately. Just do. Do it like this.

It rained all day. Cool breeze through the house until the rain stopped and rose from the hot ground in steam, streaming through the open windows, laying damp on the wood floors, sticky under feet, laying damp on the bed sheets. Sticky, swelling, unclean. Humidity opening me up.

Homework for the weekend is to have a pleasant experience. Some of the options listed in the book: take a bubble bath, have sex, go shopping, take a long walk, dine out, play tennis, read a book, paint your nails. My pleasant experience is music blasting, so so super loud. Only louder. No one to turn the music down for. No interruptions. I jump on the elliptical for a while to get my heart going, my lungs screaming, my pulse pounding at my temples and in my eyeballs. Then I lie in bed with the dog and kiss his head. Then I smoke a half-smoked joint on the floor of the living room, my legs hanging out the screen door onto the back patio, breathing in the humid pine tree air and thinking of New Hampshire and my great aunt who is now dead and I watch for the slow movements of deer meandering through the woods. I light a candle and watch it flicker on top of the fireplace mantle. I eat a piece of key lime pie, and not a small piece either. I try on a blouse I haven’t worn in years, fingering the buttons that I could never do up, tie the fabric belt in a tight bow at my back, cinching it as tight as it will go and still having too much room, too much fabric. Parts of me slowly melt away – I see a different change in the mirror every few times I look. As there becomes less of me, there becomes more of me.

I’m looking back today. Years back. Years and years and years. Split my current age in half. More even. I’m told I shouldn’t look back so much, but there’s a satisfaction in comparing the past to the present. This is not what I’d expected. Not the me I imagined myself to become. A different version. No better, no worse. Maybe more neutral. I’m throwing out the extremes of me. Finally seeing the shades of gray. Accepting the shades of gray. No more good, no more bad. I do miss the intensity though. The roller coaster ride. The ecstasy and the agony. Ebony and ivory. One for you and one for me. Wha?