I don't want to write right now. Sorry.

I don’t feel like writing anything.

This isn’t writer’s block. It isn’t laziness. It isn’t even exhaustion. I just don’t feel like writing.

Ever get that? When you just don’t feel like doing the one thing that gives you the most satisfaction in life? If you said no, you’re lying. Or you’re young. Or you haven’t really found that one thing yet.

And it’s not that I don’t feel like doing anything thing, either. I feel like watching these candles flicker. I feel like eating six gigantic bags of Cheetos. I feel like watching the remaining two seasons of Breaking Bad I have yet to watch on Netflix, and then possibly starting another series  - Game of Thrones - that everyone tells me I’d better watch or my existence on this planet will be meaningless.

Not that it already isn’t. I mean, if I did feel meaningful, I’d write, right?

That’s the problem. I don’t feel like being meaningful. Or symbolic. Or narrative. Or even talking about what’s going on in my head or putting it out there or anything.

I’ve felt this way before. Where all I wanted to do was nothing. Not work. Not write. Not listen to music. Nothing. Just watch television and let it go in the eyes and out the ears. 

It was ten years ago. Right now. This moment was when it started.

No response to treatment. Waiting it out. Spending all day in a room playing cards and trying to eat and carry on like everything was normal. Just another day. Like it was just a broken leg or something.

Then they send you home because, well, you’re just sitting around, and really, to sit around all day and wait for something requires an incredible amount of strength. Try it. It does. And for that, you need rest.

But you can’t sleep. And you can’t do anything productive, constructive, creative, or, well, anything at all, really. Just watch television. Reading requires brain power. Gaming requires temperament that you don’t really want to have at that moment. So it’s couch, flake, TV.

You kinda fall asleep but you don’t really. And it was at that moment that, in some weird aligning of the  universe, the channel I had it on started to show The Crow.

You can call it a coincidence. You can call it clever programming. You can call it scheduled by the powers that be in the longform license. But for a channel to show The Crow on a cold, February night at 1AM is a little more than serendipity or a well-timed goth cliche. 

For you see, The Crow was the first movie I saw by myself just before I met my husband, which was about ten years prior to that February. There’s a voiceover at the beginning of The Crow that goes like this: 

People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.

Right after I watched that voiceover, the phone rang. They called us back to the hospital. So we could say goodbye.

So no, I don’t feel much like writing tonight. Because in about two hours from now, it will be exactly ten years since I answered the phone. In these past ten years, I haven't thought as much about that night and that phone call as I have this past week. But it's that time. It's past the break even point. The letting go is done and gone. But tonight, this night, and this day tomorrow, my heart will be a little belaboured. So it's just not a good time for me to write.