Je suis une fille perdue loup

Once upon a time my favorite word was vicissitudes.

(Do other people classify time by what their favorite word was then?)
I devoured books and organized them in piles.
These books make me nostalgic.
These books make me almost happy.
These books make me irrevocably sad.

I turned off the lights, shimmied under the feather filled duvet, and turned on my flickering book lamp. Squinted to see the words swimming in front of me, and turned each page with fervent anticipation. These were the days when no author was too long winded, no story too ambitious, and I had enough passion for the written word to finish every chapter in the space between dusk and dawn.

Now my favorite word is ineffable.

But I haven’t finished a book in months. My mind wanders all over the first page, my eyes glance up at every noise. I am bored, listless, and make it through the first half of On the Road on sheer will power alone. I would have read this books in five hours even two years ago, I remind myself with great disappointment.

Poetry I still devour, but only because I need the words themselves to make sense of things. Words are the only thing I experience, understand, grasp. Don’t ask me what effervescent, woebegone, opulent means. I can’t define words, I feel them. I see them with glassy, starlit eyes. (Ask someone what their favorite word is sometime, it will explain almost too much about who they are. Even more so if they don’t have one at all.)

Will I ever find a cure for this apathy? I press on to March, hoping that spring might awaken my book lust once more.

"Courage," the Grey Wolf said,

"It doesn't come easily,

But it's what you need.

No one should keep their ghosts as pets."

Hello, I'm Tiffany Wolf. It's my first month as a certified gypsy. I'm sad to say that I spent the first week of it in a rather pathetic bout of depression and self-loathing. When you've spent so much time as a sad person, it takes a whole lot of bravery to teach yourself to be happy.

Even moreso, when you've spent so much of your life as an unpaid actress, being forced to play a role, it takes courage to figure out what even makes you happy to begin with. But I'm determined that the words I write won't be fit for a Shakespearean tragedy, as been a common theme in all past projects.

What is making me happy on this eleventh day of February? Heart shaped earrings, bangles, Earl Grey tea from teacups, and Dolly spinning the afternoon away. Mornings spent exploring my new neighborhood, and evenings getting lost in stacks of dusty books.

But I'm not ready to give up all my somberness. As Sally Sparrow once said, "sad is happy for deep people." Poignant sadness. Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie sadness.

‎"Your skin is something that I stir into my tea
And I am watching you
and you are starry, starry, starry"