Twilight Zone

Imagine, if you will, a door.

No, strike that. That sounds way too Rod Serling-like.

Imagine a room. A modest but respectable room just big enough to contain those things important in life. These things are meticulously organized; stacked and categorized, everything in its place. It’s simple, uncomplicated. Mundane, for sure, but drama free. It’s…..nice and you’re….content. You’ve worked diligently for a long time to ensure that everything is exactly where it should be and that nothing that could possibly rock your world (for good or for bad) may enter.

Now imagine the door to this room is flung wide open and hurricane force winds blast through. Everything in the room is uprooted, displaced, hurled and spun out of any semblance of order. You try to collect things and put them back where they were, but the wind keeps coming and nothing will stick. It’s pandelirium.

That’s pretty much my life lately.

For some reason, the great almighty universe, in its infinite wisdom, decided that my world needed some badass shakin’ up.

Nothing is as it once was. I am enjoying things I’ve never before had a taste for. I have become….social. ME, the non-social wonder. I’m going out dancing and to parties and I’m riding mechanical bulls. I’m taking chances. I’m making lists of things I have never done before but am suddenly compelled to learn and master.

It’s like another person is inhabiting my body. Gosh, I hope they can cook and don’t want to get up early. I hope they like shopping. I hope they have more money than I do to GO shopping. I hope they don’t like rap. I hope they have a lot of single, good-looking, wealthy, generous, kind, funny, smart, sexy straight male friends.

But it’s not all good. My normally photographic memory is out of calibration. I am staying up working on creative projects (good)  instead of sleeping (bad). I’m freaked out by the number of paranormal, inexplicable things that are suddenly commonplace in my world. Have I always been attuned to this sort of thing and just never paid attention, or have I acquired some macabre new talent? It’s as though some sort of door has opened and new, fascinating and frightening things are rushing in faster than I can process them.

And NO….it’s NOT “hormones.” For god’s sake, if you’re going to flip me off, come up with a better excuse than THAT.

Something far bigger than me is dealing the cards at the moment, and I’m getting stuck with playing the hand. I don’t like gambling. Why? Well, because it’s….gambling. I like to tie things up with neat, tidy explanations, and I like all those things to fit neatly within my personal paradigm box. 

But for whatever reason, the universe has decided that my previously mundane, boring, hermit-like existence is over. It’s a riptide of change and I can only hope to stay atop the wave and see where it takes me.

I only wish I’d taken those swimming lessons in third grade.