Leave a difference at all

I feel trapped sometimes, and weirdly enough I think it is partly the color of the light around me that affects this feeling. I hate yellow light. It is the part of fall and winter that holds no love or fascination.

Golden light I love; every photographer needs their golden hours of the day. That gentle gilded glow adds so much to any subject. No, what I cannot handle is harsh yellow light. Summer afternoons radiate with it and winter evenings do in the hours just after the sun has gone. Through most artificial light in these evenings, everything becomes stale, too warm, and itchy and yet toes stay slightly too cold. Escape and change become my inner chant at these times.

I want to run in the dark, tell secrets, and laugh airlessly with my friends far away and do it by the strange shadows of summer nights or the white brightness of winter mornings.

Fall gives birth to many urges and experiences, but sadly one of them has left me in these years living too far south for true seasons. Back in Ohio when fall turned cold and brown and deep after its earlier kaleidoscopes I would get what I called "land urges". It felt like longing and loyalty and fierceness all at once. I wanted to stand on a hill with a stick in my hand surrounded by wind and earth and belonging. This feeling rooted me to my place and told me of future connections that could grow even deeper. This cannot happen here; I feel nothing for this shifting sanddirt it isn't the earth and clay that I love. It holds biting ants and spiky strange growths. Lovely and wild yes, but never ever mine.

I wonder how connected everything is sometimes. If I exercise again today will I feel like I can live here longer without losing something precious? Does applying for lifetime jobs all over the country attune me to my gypsy self? Does growing older inspire rebellion? These answers elude me solidly.

My hands want to grasp and my eyes to scan. My location cannot change now, and my work requires me to be grounded for months and months yet. Sometimes it is all I can do to transubstantiate my desires into the realm of the possible. But then in the realm of reality, as always, I trip into conflict, compromise, contention.

Monday, I walk into the house of law. Interviewers will try to find out about me and make guesses like those addicted to horse races. Strangers and I might become a jury together and put on blindfolds so as to be many faces of justice. Sunday, my escapes appear like clockwork. Saturday, I could hunt and watch the gavel fall many times. But what about tonight? I do not know what I can do.