Sweeping away the bad luck
It is Friday, and normally I'd excitedly declare that I will be bad and stay up all night since I do not need to wake early tomorrow for work. But today, I find myself tired and despondent. That feeling of tears welling up behind the eyes — I feel it in my whole body. I want to sleep, and I want to sleep until this is all over.
I've been lucid dreaming, and someone once recommended trying to fly, so I gave it an attempt. I flew towards the stars and turned back to observe the curvature of Earth, when a thought crept in, "I can't breathe this high up." Then I started suffocating, but I've never suffocated before, so my mind approximated the feeling as a dullness, then a fading away. It's strange how the mind cobbles together a feeling it doesn't know.
Yesterday, one end of the string in my sweatpants disappeared into its hole. I didn't care to fish it back out, so I pulled the string out through the other end and tossed it onto the floor for the cats to discover. They found it quickly and were so excited that even Dione, our more passive cat, aggressively played with it. My husband has since taken the string and carries it around in his pocket. When the cats are rambunctious, he pulls it out to tease and distract them.
It was Lunar New Year, and we did not do anything special to celebrate — except clean. V reminded me to clean all week, and we finally got around to it on Lunar New Year's Eve. Towards the end, my husband asked why we were cleaning; I wasn't sure, so I asked V. She explained that we were "sweeping away" the bad luck so it doesn't cross over into the new year, also so that we don't clean while it's the new year because then we'd be washing away the new.