It's like when you think Buffy's dead, but then she springs up to deliver a one-liner and kick some demon's ass

Everything around me is under construction. As I write this, there is one of those crane thingies outside my office window, with a scruffy muscle-shirt dude on it. He is scraping and scraping the paint on the outside window panes. This is what it sounds like: Scriiiiiiiiitch. Scriiiiiiiiitch. Long pause during which I pray that it is over. Scccrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch. He’s actually looking into my window right now as I write this, and probably thinking, “Wow, this bitch never seems to do any actual work. What is her job, anyway?” (he was here yesterday too, so he has proof about my lack of focus). Actually, he’s probably not thinking that. He’s probably thinking, “I wish she would close her curtains so this would be less uncomfortable for both of us.” Or maybe he’s thinking, “Man, this job sucks. I wish I had her job—all she seems to do is look at clothes online (my computer screen faces the window).”

So I can’t really use my phone, which is about 50 percent of my job, because of this deafening scritching. And then outside my door, in the hallway, two other scruffy dudes are repairing the tile on the floor. They are not using this mini-jackhammer thingie that they were using at the beginning of the week, thank god, but they have buckets of murky water and tiles and other mysterious objects lying all around so I have to say excuse me about 10,000 times a day, and it’s driving me crazy. What I really want to do is scream “Get the fuck out of my way!” but then I’d get fired. Actually, they couldn’t fire me because I only have two weeks left at this job, before I become unemployed and homeless and probably even more disgruntled, if that’s possible. And plus my boss (who retires in 5 days and is just as disillusioned with this place as I am) is very old and doesn’t have feeling in one of his feet and I’m scared he’s going to fall and break his hip again every time he leaves his office.

Ok, so now onto the construction going on at my house. That’s right, not only do I get to hear scritching and thumping and loud conversations and drills and hammering at work, but I get to hear them when I get home too. Because my landlord has decided to do some kind of mystery work on my backyard, on my windows, and on the windowsills. I’m not sure exactly what he’s doing, but it’s clear that it’s going to be happening until I move out. My backyard looks like an excavation site, or like someone is trying to find the hellmouth (Buffy reference). My tiny and nervous dog is going nuts. Seriously, barking and screaming all day. I’m not there for most of it, because thankfully their work day ends around 6, but it is very disheartening to leave one construction site for another each time I change my location. The scruffy dudes working on my house give me dirty looks every time I come home at lunch to let my little princess out. They hate her. I can see why; I’d probably hate her too if we weren’t family (she’s my sister rather than my daughter, if you were wondering).

But then there’s this whole thing where I’m trying to love my fate, as Nietzsche recommends. Or see my life as a series of enlightening metaphors, which Jung recommends, and which I’m pretty good at doing. For instance, I’ve diagnosed my chronic head and neckaches as my insistence on making my head responsible for all of my current stress and agony (moving, future insecurity, divorce, etc.). It’s like my neck is saying “This is way too heavy for me—could we like, spread this angst out a bit?” So I’m trying to let more of myself feel this stress—maybe move it down to a lower chakra that would be more equipped to handle it. Maybe if it was in my hip area, I wouldn’t turn it and churn it and process it so much. I could just let it sit there (what can I say; I don’t have cable).

So here’s my metaphor for all of this goddamn construction around me: my soul is under construction. I’m in the process of becoming something different; becoming who I am instead all of the things I spent so long trying to be (wife, good daughter, poet, successful, blah blah blah). This construction is very heavy and painful (my head concurs). So it makes sense that it would follow me around this way externally. Maybe my external life is trying to take some of the weight for me. My old self slaps me on the wrist for having these self-obsessed and narcissistic thoughts. But the new self emerging from the rubble that was my former life feels at peace with this metaphor. I think I need it to get through these next weeks. Everything that was mine in the last year…my job and my home and my mate…are crumbling and falling away (one of these is pretty much completely crumbled). I need metaphors now more than ever. Making my life one big poem seems to be the only way to get through it, and to see that there is still a spark of some kind of magic there even as everything is being stripped away. Ye Olde Christian me would have called this spark God, and I still do on some days. But everything about Christianity is what forced me to build up all of this crap in the first place, crap that must now be torn down or reconstructed. The only way I can deal with the big C (the one that promises eternal life, not the other one) is to see it as metaphor anyway—it’s so much more beautiful that way. Everything is.