What Cannot be Cured...

A shitty day.  Made unbearably shitty by something that many would consider trivial, but which has upset me greatly.  A neighbour's cat, who had been missing for a couple of days turned up dead this morning, apparently having been hit by a car.  Getting upset over the demise a  cat, particularly one that wasn't even mine, might seem strange.  But I was very fond of that cat - he was a frequent visitor, in the way that cats are.  Indeed, when I was stuck at home ill earlier this year, he became a constant and reassuring presence.  (He couldn't believe his luck in finding someone home during the day that he could pester.  Interestingly, when I went back to work, he adjusted his visiting hours, turning up in the evenings instead).  Never the most demonstrative of felines when it came to affection, (he was downright stand-offish at times), he nonetheless always made it clear if he liked you.  I grew to look forward to his visits, his aloof attitude and antics always amusing me.  He'd wander all around the house, rummaging through cupboards and boxes (what he expected to find, I don't know), a pattern he repeated in just about every other house he visited (he was well known locally).  Consequently, with his passing, a little bit of joy has gone from my days.  And there doesn't seem to be much of that, these days.

Nothing, it seems, can go right for me at the moment.  I spend most days feeling tired and out of sorts, my body constantly reminding me that my recovery is far more fragile than I care to admit.  I'm back doing a job I hate, but can't decide what else I should be doing.  Which is symptomatic of the main malaise in my life right now: that I seem to have become incapable of making any kind of meaningful decisions.  My illness seems to have made me more cautious and risk averse than ever.  I really just don't know what to do for the best right now.  You know, despite my determined self-sufficiency, it is at times like this that I just wish that someone would reassure me that everything is going to be OK.  But that isn't what happens with people like me: instead of turning to outside help, we just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and carry on as best we can, hoping that we can find some route out of whatever is troubling us.  This is one of those times when I think that I should just walk out of my front door and keep on walking.  Do you ever fell like that?  It's a recurring fantasy I have about simply walking away from life and starting afresh somewhere else, where nobody knows me and there are no preconceptions about me.  My past would no longer be like a burden, constantly weighing me down and dictating my future.  Alternatively, I'd like to go to bed and sleep long enough that when I awoke everything would have changed for the better.  Or that the past year, or so had been a dream, that I'd just paid off he mortgage and dome the sensible thing of resigning from work and spending the next six months sitting on a beach, thereby reducing my stress and avoiding the resulting ill health.  But none of that is going to happen, so I'm just going to have to grin and bear it until this mood passes and I can think straight again.  Like they say: what cannot be cured must be endured.