Tonight I ran along the bayou, steadily ingesting hordes of small insect life for about a mile, till finally I could stand it no longer and forced myself to slow to a walk. A walk, it seems-- even a fast-paced walk-- allows time for the exacerbating little creatures to avoid at least my mouth. Really, I suppose it was my fault for running at dusk along the bayou.
[Author's note to non-Houstonians: The bayou, in this case otherwise known as Mason Creek, is merely a waterway... concrete-lined, like so many I grew up with in Oklahoma. Nothing so spiffy as it sounds.]

I'm hovering. I'm treading water. If I thought I was in limbo two and a half months ago, I was wrong. That was nothing compared to this. That was a mere ripple in the ocean of displacement. I've been pulled down by the undertow since then. I don't live here, I don't belong here, and there's no point in trying to settle in. I only exist, waiting, watching, wandering through each day in a vague hope that the date on my tickets will someday arrive. That I'll get on an airplane and go someplace else, someplace different, someplace far away. That those seven weeks of torturous schedules and sessions and convenant groups were not an end in themselves.

There is more than all this, I know. This is an in-between time. And I could go into the cheesy illustration of the trapeze artist, but I won't. Suffice to say, I'm feeling disconnected. Neither here nor there.

I grow tired of waiting. But I dare not ask for patience.