Fog

I realized last night, after a few days of fighting off a chest cold with wine and dayquill, that I have been in a state of indifference toward living for several years now. I am going through the motions of the things that are supposed to bring joy (work, family, friends, love interests, etc), but I don't feel actual joy. I feel an absence of joy and this absence of joy has me intrigued. I haven't felt safe and at peace in decades. Those are separate things, feeling joy, feeling safe, feeling at peace. I've been chasing joy, hence the nightly wine ritual (liquid yoga), but what I really want is to feel safe and to feel at peace. The last time I felt safe and at peace, I was in my twenties, living in a borrowed cabin with no insulation on a little lake that would conjure a quilt of the most magnificent fog every morning at day break. I'd walk down to the water's edge and lose sight of my little jonny boat the moment it was fully in the water, giggling to myself as I blindly gripped the aluminum sides and climbed inside. I loved the feeling of my soaked pajama bottoms, bare feet firmly planted on the bottom of the boat as I rowed out, completely invisible in the fog. I felt like I could disappear in that fog, as though I already had. Every morning that blissful summer, I started my day by entering that fog and staying with it until all the loons went home and the sun was high enough in the sky to wake up my son and my then husband, whom I'd eventually leave, like I always leave (as a later victim pointed out), in search of something more. More. More what? More fog maybe?