Contours of a Shadowed Rose

Liquid nitrogen is a lot of fun. Sorry, I'm still too tired to actually write anything intriguing or very coherent, so I'll resort to a description of my day and/or mental processes throughout the course thereof; hopefully that'll be tolerable for today. So someone poured liquid nitrogen over an eraser and (of course) it froze. And then someone else asked if it would shatter. That thought actually...shattered...(no pun intended) my thoughts. Everything came back through my haze of fatigue in a rush of memories.

One of the first things I thought of was what a friend had said about being able to put a rose into liquid nitrogen, and how it could shatter when you took it out. Then that brought me back to the night I finally decided to start this blog, and how I was asking that same friend for suggestions for titles. The name of this post is actually one of the things she suggested, among other things. But that's not the point of anything...and then I just remembered the circumstances around me at the time I started all of this. It was over a month ago now, although barely so, yet it feels like an eternity. Everything has changed. The people who I initially intended to read this blog have all either stopped reading it or do so without my knowledge, whereas many people I didn't expect to talk to about this are reading it now.

And everything was different in my life then, too. My views on things have changed in the space of a month. My hopes, my dreams, my desires...all of them have been altered. Today has been an interesting day. Some developments took place that amused me, and others which bring shadows to mind. There's something about writing this right now that really lets me step back and just think about my life. I can detach myself from the emotions and sorrows associated with it and just analyze them, in the scientific and precise manner that I by far prefer. That's not to say that I do not enjoy sentimentality or romance, because by all means, I do, but at the same time, being able to step out of it all is just so convenient when life takes a nasty turn.

I feel at peace right now. That phrase may be cliche, and the sentiment may be caused by the fact that I will hopefully be getting into bed half an hour from now, but it adequately expresses the processes of my mind right now. Even as I look at the mountains ahead of me, I can look behind me and see the crags that I have gone through before. Somehow, if only in my mind, that makes it all better. But what does it matter whether it is real or not? After all, it's that which lies in our minds that makes us most capable of dealing with the world around us.