Full circle

"My thoughts are scattered and they're cloudy...."

I drove Cindy to work in the morning. The radio played as we traveled the streets to Griffin Technical College. After dropping her off, I continued to my office. The cars around me swirled around as if I were in an eddy of a river and the water was moving around me, independently, uncontrollably. The light in the morning was silver, flowing like mercury around me and I felt like I was tied to the ground, trapped in mud. My feet of mud, also.

I slogged toward my office and the car stopped and I stepped out onto the drive. Today, I received a small gift as I stepped across the parking lot. The aroma of one of the flowering bushes swelled up from off the drive. It caught my attention and I had to stand still and try to find the source of the sweet smell. In hindsight, I think I found it. I don't know.

I lurched up the wooden stairs, grasping the handrail on the stairwell. I looked above to see if someone was there, awaiting me. There wasn't. I was alone on the second floor. I grasped the small, hard key to my office from my pocket and inserted it into the lock.

I opened the door and found the mess I had left when I left my office on the previous Saturday afternoon. I sat down heavily in my chair. I turned on the computer and I looked out the window. The leaves on the trees were turning. An ambulance drove by on the street below, its siren throbbing through the windows and the shades.

I tried to do something, anything. I completed some tasks, but it was a slow, dreadfully slow day. The next day I realized how little I had accomplished, by the mass of tasks left undone for that day.

At the end of the day, I was waiting for the time when I could leave my office and go pick up Cindy. I pulled the travel bar from my bookcase and poured myself a shot of bourbon. I turned on the music on my computer and listened to Earth, Wind and Fire sing about Autumn and lost loves. It reminded me of Lexington and college days and yearning in my dorm room for someone on the other side of the continent. The same one I would be picking up at Griffin Tech in a few minutes.

And so the world came full circle in the still, dying day. An afternoon in Autumn. Again.