Among poetry books and boxes

 'Time cannot take what love has given.'               Kathleen Herbert

The above sentence is a final line from a poem in a book entitled 'Here and Now'.  Yet it is so much about the past.  And I seem to have been sucked into thinking about the past too much lately.   I seriously believe it's watching ER that has caused it.  It's entirely my fault.  I should have known there would be consequences, just like those of opening a box of old diaries.  Things seep out and fill the air with an intoxicating allure to 'go back' to where the residual comfort and sense of 'home' were.  (And I don't mean England.)

I've had some very strange dreams lately.  (This is usually a sentence that fills everyone with dread, "for god's sake, don't tell us about your goddamned dreams!"  And I agree with that sentiment.  So I won't talk about my dreams.  Much.)  They've not been particularly 'set in the past', but involve people I haven't seen in a while though strangely enough, in totally unfamiliar places.  Maybe my brain is secretly trying to escape.  Except the past is the path of most resistance.  I know.  I could feel it in my bones.  I knew going back into old feelings would do me no good.

I have to find a way to push into future plans, positively.  I must find a way to see something desirable ahead and not just in the next month or so, but beyond that.  I just don't know if there's a way back from this new trap I've got myself into.  People keep asking me how long I'll be in the Czech Republic, without realising that coming here was the equivalent of Dustin Hoffman in 'Outbreak' exposing himself to the virus that his wife/partner was dying from, before they'd found the source: there's no going back unless a miraculous cure is found.  And the odds don't look good.  (PS: this is real life not a Hollywood film, so those odds just plummeted...)

So I don't know what I'm doing, other than muddling through, trying to keep my head above water, trying to keep doing aerobics like my life depends on it (and it probably does, those endorphins are my ration of survival resources) and hoping this isn't the last vestige of hope I have left being slowly chipped away before my eyes.

But I do have a huge box of letters that prove I was once loved, and though I cannot face (or imagine ever facing) reading them again, the size of the box is enough proof for now, that if I've been a waste of time, then, as the song goes, I was at least someone's 'favourite waste of time.'  And maybe that counts for something.