waxing poetic about skiing. (oh. that's a bad pun.)

lately upon waking up in the morning, all i want to do is go skiing; honestly, the eventuality of going skiing at some point in the day is all that can lure me out of my bed. today i knew i didn't have to work in the evening so i found myself counting the hours between going to school & working there & then going home so i could retrieve my skis & then go around & around for an hour before coming home to do more work. my sanity has been preserved by the snow. (which is starting to melt at an alarmingly swift rate....)

when i ski i think a lot about things i bury in the various layers of sedimentary strata in my brain. these are things that would upset me any other time, but somehow they seem less disturbing. they still ache, but they ache in a way that seems natural, like the burning pain between your shoulder blades (where your wings would grow if you had them) when you fishbone up the hills. that sort of pain is accepted, & can be understood.

everything feels heavy lately. bone marrow turned into amber, heavy heavy light. i think sometimes about how i feel like i've suddenly grown up over the last few months. it's strange. i've always felt numerically ageless & insouciant in so many ways. but now, i feel that i have suddenly realized not my chronological age, but my actual emotional age.

when i found out dad was sick i was having a lot of issues with my anxious, paranoid brain. it sort of shocks me how quickly i was able to force that to subside, to gather up all the strands of my loose mind to prepare myself to help him. i still can't believe how i managed to get through some of this. how i can quell the horrible internal discord that i feel in order to take care of him, take care of my mother. & she too has needed that so much since her mother passed away.

sometimes i think, too, that it is my grandmother's strength that allows me to function right now. i like to think it's been transferred, inherited, somehow. my mother gave me a cheque the other day for a large sum of money. she told me it was my inheritance from my baba. it struck me as so strange. incongruous, even -- because when she said it i thought about the old ukrainian word babizna "an inheritance from one's grandmother" & how it seems to consist of the words baba + zna, & how zna maybe comes from znaty, to know, znannia, knowledge. i don't know the official etymology, but i know that for me, my grandmother's wealth will never be associated with money, but wholly with knowledge.

sometimes lately when i start to feel crumbly, i think that what i need is someone to come & take care of me. but if i go out on my own, i go skiing, i realize that maybe i can take care of myself. & just bothering to actually do something for myself is what i actually need.

however, the snow is melting now, & while spring is all fine & good, running until my joints complain does not compare with the lovely low-impact glide of skiing. i think the season's over... & so i lament.