Falling Apart

I have been so busy that I have prayed for some let up.  I don't feel the same, don't know my neglected body. I feel ghostlike, unsubstantial.  I don't recognize the house, don't remember what I do after I come home late.  I am reeling like Anderson Cooper in an angry mob (oh, and maybe I've changed my mind about going to cover the Egyptian riots).  They are discovering new planets the size and shape and density of the earth in just the right "zone" for water to stand on the surface.  I recall all the cheap old black and white science fiction movies I watched on television as a kid about such things, and it makes me want to recover and to live in order to see what will come.

But last night I got the worst sort of reprieve from working in my studio.  One of the nicest, most accommodating women in the world got ready for our second Polaroid when the lens fell apart in my hand.  Just the mechanism, the mechanical part.  The glass was intact.  I sat for an hour trying to put it back together, but I was really just touching metal to metal and moving it this way and that hoping that it would simply fall back into place, hoping the gods would finish laughing at me and let me have the lens back again so that we could make lovely pictures that night.  But they didn't.  I was devastated.

So now I feel lost.  I will not be able to shoot until I either get the lens repaired or buy another.  I must spend money for a camera that will shoot the last ten or so boxes of Polaroid film.  I tell myself, "forget it, move on," but I begin to shake and to shiver.  Perhaps I need a support group or to check myself into rehab.  I don't know.  I don't know.

All around me life is in tatters.  I turn and twist and twirl as if looking for something, as if trying to fend off foes, hoping to get a quick glimpse of the thing that stays just out of sight.  My pulse races, my breath quickens.  How long can I twirl like this, I ask.  How long can I go?