It Waxes Wet

It's raining today, for the first time in memory it seems (when did it last rain on a weekend?) and rainy days, when I can be inside my room with a few dim lamps to cast a warm glow, make me contemplative. I'm so contemplative now, peacefully so—thoughts keep meandering in and out of my head, some sad, but not painfully so. Plaintive are my thoughts today.
I don't know where I'm going. Or who I am. But I don't want to wrestle with these questions, especially not now. I thought, I need to get out of my own head. So I volunteered, briefly, at the Hospice of Leesville. I was assigned to three women, two of them dying in the Alzheimer's Ward. It's so depressing going there that I haven't been in nearly a month. That makes me feel selfish. Getting out of my own head put me back there with a vengeance.
I want to be useful to someone. I watch my sister with her baby and think—I want someone to need me that way. I want to me a mother. I taste the word mother in my mouth and it's foreign but somehow it feels like it could be right. A squeeze into a shoe too small, but once you've worn it around for a while, it becomes your favorite pair. I love wacky metaphor.
But how to become one? Of course I want love, romantic love. I want it in and of itself, not as a means or an end to a baby. I want my wish for a baby to be a mirror of the love I have for this phantom-father. A person I love so much that to have his child would be the greatest thing I could think to do for him. Something like that. Do I romanticize things too much? I think I do. I think I'll read this a day from now and roll my eyes at myself.
I'm so longing. Every cell in my being is longing, pulling outwards for something else than just me. It's like I'm magnetic and being pulled towards another magnet but I can't see it or know what direction it is. And I think this feeling is pulling me towards love, but maybe it isn't.
It's a waxing crescent tonight and I want someone to gaze at the barely-visible moon with me. Someone I like, not just anybody. Hardly anyone would please me. (Though I would never let on, feigning temperance and sweetness as I do.)
I'll stomp my foot and be done with this tantrum. Listen to the Icelandic lullaby and my pretty room and my dog, who loves me, and who I love, and be happy.

I Know Not Where I Go

I Know Not Where I Go

I'm lonesome for I know not what —
The North Star told me so;
though south I travel every day,
due north at night I go.

The sun arcs high from east to west,
its backdrops rearrange—
and during day the south is warm,
the north is gray and strange.

As dusk begins to blush such hues
as only fall leaves know,
the North Star gleams, it shines its eye—
it knows I do not know.

That bright star points my way back home
where those who love me best
are deep entranced in this and that
and leave me to my rest.

I'm lonesome for I know not what
the sun climbs towards the west—
according to our deeds, we live;
at night the robins nest.

But I can't help but wander to
and even further fro;
the North Star disappears in day—
I know not where I go.