Saggy baggy sweat pant self

A stranger to myself all day. My alert and active self, the responsive part of me that knows me as myself, not to be found.

Where are you, lively one? You've left me here with this saggy baggy sweat pant self whose best idea is sitting gazing numbly out of the window. It feels like fatigue, but not of the body. You, my better and certainly more interesting self, the one wearing the proudly lettered sweater, are elsewhere.

Can an Other's absence be encountered?  Jack Miller, I think in his book God: A Biography, speaks of different kinds of absence, one being the scent left lingering in a room. Such an absence implies a recent removal hence, a presence elsewhere. Perhaps an imminent return, hopefully before the perfume has dissipated, and the memory has nothing to rely on but itself.

It's not that the world seems insipid, nor that I am melancholic, but that the point of my attention on what's around me feels blunted, like soft lead on steel plate. How else to register my complaint about being left behind, abandoned?

I don't know where zest comes from, or why it goes. Fatigue has something to do with it; perhaps over-expression requires replenishment. Maybe Monday. Perhaps the livingness of my encounter with this Other self is in my impatience itself to renew acquaintance, to sense the coming quick step, to feel the sudden waft of fresh air, to pull myself up straight in readiness.