2024-09-19
It is a joyful day today: grey, damp, somewhat misty. It's a nondescript day; the kind of day a narrator would omit; the kind of day to elide; the kind of day with no pride. Oddly, the sky is still distinguished from the grey of once white buildings, yet to the same degree as from the palm trees, or the sun-ripened maples.
In such a meagre, mediocre, middling day, it would only be apt, and it is, for my mood to be the same. I notice without seeing; I hear without listening; I am waking without being awake. A detached, depressed, day. In fact, upon waking up I open the curtains to find the room as dark as when they were shut; yet the skies are not dark-black, but grey. The skies here never are black: the ever-alive, ever-half-dead, city of sorts.
There is no connection, no binding; or the binding is a grey, flimsy structure as with the rest. To think that the parting of a cloud could give the sun to the land, and hope back to human hearts; yet, it shan't part. Today is that kind of a grey day.
The grass is a golden-grey from the parching sun; but there is no sun anymore. The fields are tilled to a lacklustre brown, yet we've no more crops to sow for the rest of the year. The once blooming flowers are run to seed, and brown.
Winter is here, I suppose.
It's a saddening thought that the summer is far behind us, so long gone, so forever away, so eternally distant; we've the long winter to handle now, then the cold spring. Really, the cold is never so cold, and the winter never so long: in a way, the cold too is grey, mediocre, middling, apathetic, never aggressive, nipping, biting. The days are short and worthless; the nights are become usual and excessive.
I did like the winter. I think this year I shan't. See, it is cold, and not cold enough; dark, and not dark enough. I think I grow tired with things that become inconsequential, and not worthy of discussion. The weather is odd, but it never seems to hit extremes; we did not get forty-degree heat this year, rather, we got a rather middling summer that disappeared in a few days it feels like. In the north, winter persisted until May or June, I believe. Here, we had nothing but wet until April or May, excessive slugs and snails, failing crops; then we had a summer, that came too late, and offered too little; then we are coming now into autumn (the leaves are beginning to fall, and conkers adorn the street), and it's still... too warm. It went colder - down to fourteen - last week, and yet it's back to a fairly warm standpoint, but not warm enough! And simultaneously too hot, if that makes sense.
I despise this mediocrity which I feel pervades my life, and likely the lives of everybody else too... Yet, I am inert to stop it, in true aptness. I don't know what to do, and can't do anything. It is a useless, fruitless, endeavour. In fact, the allotment this year carries the term fruitless to literal exemplitude: there was practically no fruit, no harvest. A few tomatoes from a weak and withering plant; yet all else died.
I suppose I want summer back?
What can I do about this? Well, if I'm talking about outside, likely very little; man was made to tolerate a depressing winter, and that I must do this year again. Oddly, though I've had twenty-two of them before me, I feel this one is particularly challenging. It's too... nothing. It will require me to shift back to a mode where I am focussed on thought, and on study, and these kinds of things, as opposed to being able to be outside in the open world, and exposing myself to newness, the sun, the world.
I am still, after so many years, lost, listless, longing, lacklustre, languishing, loveless, less. Is this the bad type of self-reflection? We've had too much rain this year; the lakes are full; I am a naive Narcissus, impotently staring at his reflection in the murky waters, wondering if it couldn't be a little more beautiful. Couldn't it just? Couldn't I fix it? I think I can't fix it.
Oh, mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head. Oh, The Smiths, don't you reflect my mood ever so well? Don't you amplify it ever so well?
The melancholy of being trapped in a train, and seeing out over the sky, that never once shifts from grey. Of going to work and seeing out the window a sheer grey. Of going for lunch and eating under an unedifying grey. Of returning to a work in a world of grey e-mails, tasks. Of returning home from work with a grey walk home. Of having nothing to do but sort out household tasks, so dull and grey... Of sleeping in a not quite dark enough room (grey, too), and waking up to no light, only grey.
Yet, I am not sure it is the sky that is the problem.
Have a good one.