What is on the other side of the veil?

More writing with no assignment – I’ve sent Jay for the book but I don’t know if that will actually work. We’ll see. What an odd time right now. I feel my mood swinging around at the whim of the wind it seems. Like a flag when the wind is swirling. It is disconcerting when I can detach myself enough to see that it is happening. I have noticed in the past week and a half that being indoors is a bit of a trap. Each time I have gone out of doors I’ve felt better. Once to watch the kids play in the snow and dig out the car and again to ski with Ana. Both times I felt better for it. I can’t tell if it was the physical activity or if it was the sun that did it but I know I’m not imagining the surge. Another thing that seemed to make a difference was yesterday I was able to turn my music pretty loud in the car. I liked that too. Okay on to the assignment – Jay actually found the book. I have also flipped two fried eggs while doing this. The assignment is more about journaling. Keeping a journal and accounting for things in different ways. Experimenting with POV, sentence length, nouns, avoiding the forms of be. In the example there was an entry about getting a letter. And of course we have been getting letters lately. It is Christmas and letter writing has descended to that hasn’t it? We all just write letters at Christmas anymore, except for Betty, whom I write more often than that. Letters of note this year are the handwritten variety. I’ve always known this about Christmas letters. I’ve always known that I liked the ones with a note scrawled across the back of them. The note from John sticks in my memory most I think possibly because it came fairly recently compared to the others. It was newsy and contained a picture of him on the deck of a cruise ship near Oslo. He is getting his MBA at Madison right now which I didn’t realize until Su emailed a few weeks ago. So I tracked him down and we emailed a few times and I nailed down the address so I could send him a Christmas card. Seems like he is happy. I think perhaps the real reason that his letter sticks with me is because his life has turned out so different from mine. He is not married. He does not have kids. He doesn’t even have a career that obsesses him. He seems to float around from place to place, job to job in what appears to be an aimless fashion. This is from the outside looking in with little information to go on. And it makes me wonder and fires my imagination. What would it be like to be John? What does John think about and worry about, if not the things that I think about and worry about? I asked Michael this fall if I had created this life in order to distract me from the things that I wanted that scared me. This is not a complaint, this is me wondering what is on the other side of the veil. This is me comprehending that I’ll never know. The choices that I have made are permanent ones and don’t misunderstand me. I don’t regret them. This isn’t about regret. This is about imagination. I really can’t imagine a solitary life with so little attachment and it makes me wonder. So I’ve described a letter to you and how it made me feel and I think I’ve avoided the forms of be but I’d have to know more about the forms of be to be able to avoid them.