A BRIEF RESPITE

Reading week at last! I thought it would never get here, and yet it came very quickly too. Explain that one to me please! Anyways, I'm at HOME. Glorious, just glorious. Got here last night and get to stay til Wednesday. Three whole days! This is literally the best thing to happen to me since Christmas. And I think that this time at home is needed, really I do. The past month and a half has been pretty rough, with lots of low points. It's nice to be back in a "refuge-like" place and to be able to regain some perspective. And it's going to be a sorry thing, to leave here again. To go back to a stress-filled existence, where the people I know aren't happy most of the time and everyone is short-tempered fairly often, or just plain depressed. And where the "happy" people use sarcasm to prove their "happiness" and where no one is really who they are. And then isn't it any wonder why things that should be good fall apart and the people are left wondering how it got that way, and are puzzled at how to put things right? Because how do you fix that which is wrong if you didn't know it was that bad in the first place? And once you think you have the causal factors figured out, how can it become better if the causal factors can't be fixed or changed? Are you just supposed to put up with the bad state of things until circumstances happen to change? What if everything implodes in the meantime? And even if it seems like things are changing, what if they really aren't? What if they're just tricking themselves into thinking that everything's ok? People could go mad with the "what ifs!" And so I'm very happy to be home right now, where life goes smoothly for the most part, and I'll be very sorry to go back. Somehow it's just always easier to breathe out here. Maybe it has to do with the lack of traffic...