A hard day's night

This is what the sky looks like right now, in the afternoon. It is spitting occasional rain. It is humid and as I sit here slowly dripping, the drops running down my face to my jaw, I recall how in the morning it was even hotter with full sun coming right in through the eastern-facing sliding doors, and the radiant heat bouncing off all the surfaces of the balcony into the apartment. From time to time I get up and use the face towel hanging over the standard lamp near the exercise bike.

Today however is better than yesterday. Then, I had a Skype call with someone I know who is going through problems of her own, and while we talked I drank beer after beer. I was effected by her situation, her illness different from mine but similar, and by her daily struggle to fit into the universe. I cut the call when we had finished talking and went to bed for most of the afternoon, dreaming up disasters, contemplating my own situation and imagining things happening to upturn all the carefully laid plans that have come into being since I started this big move south. While I contemplated disasters and it was hardly pleasant to do so, accompanied as it always is with fear and loathing in the very heart of the soul, I developed an even better plan for mum's apartment and all the stuff that remains to be processed.

So while yesterday afternoon was a dire time full of terrible forebodings and shivering deep within the core of the self, it was also a useful span during which I came to better understand the scope of the task that I have set myself. And today as I sit here slowly sweating through another long afternoon I can digest the cogitations of the previous day, sure that the outcome will be good.

This morning I did another six bags of shredding and threw the resulting trash down the garbage chute in my building. I am slowly making my way through the heap of extraneous and of-interest-only-to-a-few stuff that comprises the worldly remains of my father (deceased) and mother. I will prevail. I will get through it. It will be another part of my story one day soon, a story to be told around campfires where beyond the bright ring of comradeship lies the blank of the broad night.