For Better, For Worse

In Search of the Missing Sock

I think the way to drive a person most effectively mad would be whimsically, and over time. Sneak into their house, steal one sock, chip a favorite mug. Let the air out of the bike tires, stick the nail clipper in the mailbox. This random tampering with tangibles would surely make a person feel like they are slowly losing their grip on sanity.

That is precisely how life has felt recently, like someone keeps moving the goal posts, or has made off with the football. From day to day, I no longer know what to expect. Of course, I understand I can’t control everything. I accept that. But when the majority of minutia in my world, and the world at large, feels off, from previously ubiquitous products missing from the shelves in the grocery store to awkward, oversharing conversations with relative strangers to the natural shifts of the changing season, there’s a tendency to feel unsettled.

Yesterday was just such a day. All of these things- the empty grocery store shelves, the oversharing, October first!- happened, and more, stuff I won’t bore you with. In addition, our kitchen is gutted, so I am living in a house that hollows by the minute and I have yet to figure out how to make myself comfortable, much less do laundry, in. I am a stranger in an apocalyptic version of a familiar land; I can rely on nothing, foreign or domestic. So make that unsettled, squared.

I have been getting by doing what comes next, and then, the thing after that. Step by step. Along the way, I seem to find something that delights or distracts me; both are helpful. I am daring myself to live- not just get through- this period of transition.

I know I may feel worse before I feel better. I know that human experience is complicated, but I also know that all the anxiety and precariousness toggle back time to time to the world righting itself, or feeling like it does.

I like to hope- dare to hope, really -that the missing sock was under the dryer all along. Signifying, of course, that in time, everything about all of this makes sense.