Not Margaret Atwood's World

We all may have those days in the week that are more of a travail than the rest.  I am not sure since I really don't have best friends with whom I sit around having coffee with each week reflecting on the past week like the four women who play Desperate Housewives.  I would love that kind of connection though maybe more of an Eddie Bauer version of Desperate Housewives.  The coffee without the glitz and lipstick.

For me that day is Sunday morning.  I love the quiet of the early morning hush on our urban street and it allows for my kind of melancholy to bubble up and then throw a Sunday morning pie in my face.  My family hurts and haunts or just that existential loneliness that I carry around in the world with me.  Having a job, though the minute I stepped onto the campus things were whirling and chaotic with change, is not the final answer.  There is no washer/dryer combo behind door number three that will make my life a cinch. I never thought it would as I accepted a job that was not my first choice.  For me, an overachiever by nature, this is a very hard thing to comprehend. 

For me, the last almost eight years has come and gone as if someone else were living my life and I was left in the wings watching another performance.  Strange and true or just belief emerging from unanswered questions.  Since I have never been someone with a calling or an inclination of what would be a good fit for me, I have walked into jobs, looked around, decided what would be the next promotion and worked by skinny butt off trying to get there.  I have done that several times and gained professional success and wages doing it.  I thought I was someone and yet arriving often felt empty. 

This morning as I write and keep making time to write as I toil away and find myself feeling melancholy, I imagine that someone out there is living my life though I shall never find a way back through time to find out where I made my fatal mistake and stepped into the time tunnel.  Instead, out there somewhere, maybe in a high desert viewpoint on a cloudy, grey day, a car has broken down and the inhabitants stand and stare off down the deserted highway looking for help from a passerby.  This is not like No Country For Old Men but rather a Margaret Atwood novel where our heroin is in peril but there is an underlying moral conundrum that not only makes our hair stand on end but feel like we have a stake in the happy ending.