A Woman and a Mask

I will write this on Sunday afternoon, for I know I will not have time to write it Monday morning and will not feel like writing it tonight.  It is too hot.  I have lingered here today with all good intention, making productive plans with every forethought of seeing them to fruition.  But way led to way and then it was noon and I was befuddled.  A bit later, I walked out the door.  Holy God.  By afternoon, it is simply too hot to move.  If things aren't done in the mornings now, they shouldn't be done until the sun begins to sink or until a sudden storm cools the air.  These days are O.K. as long as you are in water, but otherwise. . . .  And so by two I poured a glass of wine and wondered what I had left in the house to eat.  The air conditioner labors and the couch is calling, me wondering if I have a good book to read.

There is no reason for my lack of productivity today.  I rose at four, now haunted by the same monsters and demons I have run from for awhile.  But by nine, I had returned to my bed, and though I rose again at ten. . . the day was doomed.  And so I began the mountain of scanning and processing that I still have before me from things shot prior to vacationing.  People not on vacation do not take vacation into account in their calculations when they want something, and so I have emails asking me when the pictures will be delivered.  It takes all my psychic energy to focus on what I have to do.  It is torture.

But now that the heat and the humidity have reached lethal levels, I figure to continue that which I previously wished to avoid.  I am being productive, I say.

It is good that I do not have anyone to see just now.  It is the Danger Season.  And holy cow, I see women in their 8th or 9th month of pregnancy!  And though I haven't any idea what that is like, it looks absolutely murderous.

As the day drags on, I wonder what other people are doing.  I can get no responses to emails.  Nobody is coming to my site.  I assume the worst, of course, that they are having fun or are at least in some way content.  And it wrongs me.  Everyone apparently is enamored somewhere else.  It is terrible, but what can I do.

I pour another glass of wine.  There are only so many of those I can have before I make dinner for my mother tonight.  I must remember that.  Surely, though, another and another and I will be able to sleep it off the rest of this long, hot afternoon.

And so there was that to do and it was done.  I am as you see.  And here, a semblance.  The girl in the mask is not what she may seem.  She would not take off the mask.  She liked it, she said.  Do you think it is cultural, I asked?  What?  I don't know, I said.  I'm being silly.