A Watched Pot…

I feel like something’s been heating up under the surface, something I haven’t really been aware of until now, and even now can’t quite identify.

I started to realize this as I was posting over on the Hatrack River writers forum. I haven’t written anything, fiction-wise, since my trip to Alabama & Mississippi for hurricane relief. For a while, I thought I had simply lost my habit of writing during the trip, and hadn’t bothered to re-institute a pattern. But after talking with Nick over lunch yesterday, I realize it is more than that.

Something happened to me around the time of that trip, something I haven’t been able to put my finger on. I felt different than I expected upon seeing Katrina’s devistation. I wasn’t numb to it, exactly. I simply felt… removed, like I was seeing it through the end of a long tube. Even now when people ask me about the trip I’m really not sure what to say. I went and helped people. I saw a lot of devestation. I took a lot of pictures.

Life has felt different since. It’s kind of just happened, almost as if I haven’t really returned from that “end of the tube” effect. I suppose there has been a muted sense of concern for my heart these past few months, but even that is distant. My emotions have been subdued in strange way.

Granted, it may be more than the trip that did this. My computer was stolen just days before I flew down, and I lost of a lot of myself: years worth of journaling, a lot of my writing, maps and such I had created for my stories. I didn’t think about it this way until now, but a piece of my heart really was on that computer.

I feared, in this distant feeling, that my heart was growing cold or I had lost some sense of direction. But I’m not so sure that’s the case. With all these feeling just beginning to come to the surface, it feels more like the burner’s been on and water has been heating this whole time, I just couldn’t tell it until I started to notice these little bubbles forming inside the bottom of the pot.

What does this all mean? What in the world am I supposed to take from that trip? What am I supposed to feel for losing my record of all joys and trials for the past seven years? Is the heat on right now? And if it is, what will I finally understand of this all when the water finally comes to a boil?