don't even know

the thing that was these days was the limitless, shapeless uncertainty that extended into all directions. had she felt compelled to find a comparison to it G would have thought of her childhood, living in the small farmhouse next to the open fields were his father grew barley and wheat; and how every fall, after the crops had been cut, the vastness of the open landscape was almost too big for her child brain to comprehend. then they had used to go, her and her father, in the early mornings when the air was cool and the colours of the approaching winter were already painting themselves into the landscape, and walk on the fields; and she remembered how the ground under her feet continued further than she was able see, stretched so far there were almost no borders, and the air smelled like earth and her father like cigarettes.

it was that feeling of being small and standing in the middle of something extending beyond your strength to travel that she would have tried to describe, had someone asked her how she felt these days. only now her father was not there to carry her home when she would get tired, and the air didn't smell of earth any more but of fumes and garbage and cheap chinese restaurants. and, in all honesty, there was no one to ask her the question about how she saw things, so the slightly faulty comparison didn't really even matter.

what did matter, though, even if G had no one to share it with, was the helplessness she felt when faced with her own confusion. she didn't know much about anything, didn't know where to go or what to do or what to want, even. furthermore she knew that she didn't even have the right to be feeling the way she did; G knew that in the grander scale of things she had it remarkably well. 

every day she read from the paper or saw in the news the sad and horrible things that people had to endure all the time, everywhere. war, crime, hunger, abuse, natural disasters, poverty, accidents, death, rape, child abuse, every possible bad thing she could have ever imagined and more was happening to someone else all the time. every time she left the house she saw people who had it worse than her; she saw families living on the streets, drugged children resting on the arms of tired-looking women begging for money in the metro stations. she saw people talking or rather shouting to themselves, covered in their own filth, and she saw the empty look in the eyes of the prostitutes she passed on her way to work. and here she was, in the middle of her safe and relatively steady existence, daring to say that she was not happy and didn't even know why.

and that was really the worst; the not knowing. had there been something she could have focused on -  an unsatisfactory job, bad relationship,  30 kilos of overweight, something, anything - but instead there was absolutely no reason for her unhappiness. it just sat there, rested on her like big bird sits on a branch of a tree, unmoved by the wind that was her attempts to get rid of it. and of course she recognized that the guilt brought about her unjustified lack of happiness made things even worse and added to the length of the road she would have to travel; and so the thought became even more exhausting, and the motivation to start the journey lessened.

it didn't mean that life would have been somehow bad; it's just wasn't good, either. it was an existence with little ups or downs, and even if G felt stupid most of the time for keeping it up and doing the things that came along with it, everything from greeting the clients ay work with a smile to cooking a dinner in the evening, the other option was even more unappealing. to start to take down the constructions of her life, one by one and not knowing where to begin in order to find out the one that had a fault in them sounded arduous, so much so that even the thought of it made her shy away from thinking about the matter.

so what was left then was to see if something would surface. and she would again think of her childhood; when they had walked the fields with her father every now and then he would bend down and pick up a stone the plough had brought to surface. he would take the stone and put it in the big pockets of his work pants and take it away from the field; and just as impossible as it would have been to find that particular stone from the vast fields when it was still inside the dirt, hidden from view, it was equally difficult for G to start looking for her own stone when she had no idea of the general direction of its whereabouts.

so she walked on the fields of her mind, on the ones that had no borders, ploughing it by living her everyday life; hoping that eventually the stone would surface, and that she could finally name it and grasp it and take it away.