I need....

The spring-like days at the end of April have been followed in May by the last reminders of winter. Snow and slush and grey skies seem to linger on, with no end in sight. I've been keeping busy with work. My resolution to eat out less has been thrown by the wayside. I love the social aspect of meals out. It provides just the right amount of conversation for weekdays, when any prolonged company would have resulted in a zombie-like state the next workday.

I've sorely neglected my writing and my music lately. My motivation has run away with the spring weather. Somehow, I feel as though I'm stuck in a mental rut. In the past, I had endured nights of insomnia because of the competing voices in my head, stories waiting to be written, problems newly created and built from the trivialities of the everyday. Now, it's the opposite. I can't sleep at night because there's a silence in my head. There just seems to be an empty echo. I know in my mind that summer is around the corner, but my heart doesn't seem to accept it. And so, I can't plan for anything. I'm biding time, alone in a mountain cave, waiting for the first light of morning, the first warmth.

I've run out of good books to read. Books provide me with sustenance. Sometimes, a word, a phrase, a sentence would jolt me out of my own complacent bubble, and I would be driven to fill pages with my own scrawls. I would try to look for the perfect word that could enshrine my world, like nesting dolls that encompass all the layers of identity.

I need the spring to be back. I need a muse. I need a book, a story, a poem. I need to know that inside that last little doll nestled inside the others, there's something other than emptiness.