I'm feeling odd today. Something's off; something's not quite right. My stomach feels strange, but I'm not hungry, and I'm not ill. My head is buzzing, but I'm having trouble laying hands on any particular thought for very long. Eric's working today, so there's nobody here to whom I can talk. I tried posting to one of my conception bulletin boards, and I think I managed to freak everybody out with my odd questions. Most bizarre, this day.

The question I posed to the bulletin board was in regards to whether or not the attitude of animosity most of us seem to have toward Aunt Flo could be impacting our fertility. Every month when she shows, this feeling of hatred, rage, and violent anger toward our bodies seems to well up out of nowhere. Should we refer to her as "the witch"? Should we perceive the signs of our natural, feminine cycles as somehow "bad"? Nobody answered me, not even to say I was out of my head.

I feel nervous, though about what I couldn't say. I feel unsettled, anxious. I feel strangely disconnected, at the same time, from myself, as if the anxiety is happening to somebody else, and I am no more than a slightly interested watcher. My dreams this morning were hazy and fleeting; there was something about a ghost, I think. Maybe I was the ghost. Everybody was talking at once, and nobody noticed me walking among the crowd, trying fruitlessly to hear what they were saying. When I awoke, I found that I had ripped all the covers off the bed and tossed them to the ground.

I took a shower. I paced around the apartment like a caged tiger, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I still haven't found the answer. I e-mailed my mother. A book of modern poetry jumped out at me, so I read some of that for awhile, remembering some of the poems as old friends and finding new ones with which I had never before resonated, but which now struck a chord. I reread one by Tess Gallagher that I love, one that I set as a song some years ago, and find that I've grown into the words even more than ever before:

Have I been too long from my music? Have I been so distracted with pregnancy stuff, work stuff, and money stuff that I've forgotten the very thing that most makes me me? Am I feeling tired and listless because I've gone too long without dipping my fingers into the essence of my creative spirit?

It's been a very long time since I've written. Even while I worked on my thesis late last summer, I was merely orchestrating that which I had written many months before. I was burning out, dreading the thought of putting pencil to score; I thought a brief hiatus would benefit my spirit. Now I feel drained.

How to get back to me again?