One's Real Life

I'm trying to enjoy these last few days off before I return to work in the new year, but I am one of those people who feel guilty about every second of pleasure I experience.  I'm spending time with my cats, drinking lots of tea, reading books and blogs, and it has been glorious and magnificent (although marred by intervals of meals with friends.  The friends part--- good; the meals part -- not so much.)

I could easily stay like this forever...waking at 10:00 every morning (instead of 6:00 a.m.), my only focus and responsibility of the day being the number on the scale, the number of calories I take in, and the number of calories I burn off.

I wish I could take a year off and go live in a very small room by the sea, a room the size of a walk-in closet with nothing but hardwood floors and a high ceiling and a comfy chair and a wall of windows.  I'd take my cats and a trunk of books and tins of tea and read read read read and gaze at my cats luxuriating in the patches of sun on the floor and I would walk on the shore in the mornings and listen to music and I would write and I'd be happy, perfectly, magnificently happy, and it wouldn't matter -- actually, it would be infinitely preferable -- if I didn't have one word spoken to me over the course of that year and if I didn't have to speak to anyone.

My need for solitude is so strong, and so unrealistic, given my life.

Oscar Wilde:  "One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead."