the volubility of it worries me. paul told me once that he thought i was the most stable person he knew; now i slide between contentment and despair like clouds across the moon. i used to worry that i never got angry - never - but now there is a roiling blackness lurking somewhere and i seem unable to predict when or why it will leap to the surface and darken all my horizons. my skin feels tight and my jaw aches all the time, i need to crack my neck but can't seem to, my words bring me no solace. the rain came screaming down today, so hard and for so long that i expected to see pine trees thrashing outside my door. i sat outside with my journal but couldn't write, and when the water ceased and the heat came rushing to fill its void, my spine shifted and and edgy exhaustion welled up through me. i'm restless, prone to pacing and fidgets and sudden fits of self-consciousness, like i've suddenly been thrust into a new body and can't tell quite how it works. my slapped-together story written in the rain was a character who wakes up to find that some internal force in her has been shifted a few inches to the left and down- everything she reaches for she knocks aside, every step she takes stubs her toes, and she can't seem to adapt to this change, can't understand why the doorknobs and showerhead are so strangely out of reach. it's hyperbole, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.