Snow drifts down, in that steady, not-too-heavy, I-mean-business pace that indicates it will, as forecasters predict, fall all day.

It is another vacation day for me, one of only five I’ve taken over Christmas that, thanks to the timing of the holidays, appears to add up to 10. I’ve been almost forced to take them because I ended the year with so much extra vacation time: 120 hours in all. The tally will drop to 80 as the year ends. Still a damn shame. I didn’t use the time because I couldn’t figure out where I wanted to go, or what I wanted to do.

I sleep until almost 9, and wake feeling fabulously rested. I try to push off the sense of dread that battles with my consciousness almost upon the opening of my eyes. It is a vacation day, my son is gone and I have no concrete plans.

Thoughts of shopping dance through my head and then exit to the side. Chase Manhattan tells me my checking account is down to $5. Tomorrow is payday, but debit cards are instantaneous and the mortgage payments I’ve put off in favor of Christmas presents wait to consume my paycheck with hasty greed.

Besides, shopping isn’t what I need. It’s an activity that brings mini sparks of joy, but distracts me from the fact that I feel completely without focus. And have for so very long now.

The job feels meaningless. In fact, worse than meaningless. It fills me with a sense of dread that I am beginning to realize no salary or incentive package can permanently alleviate.

With Pam out of the neighborhood and onto a boyfriend, my social life is lackluster again. Our once-daily contact has faded with amazing speed to maybe a couple times a week, and then almost always no more than a phone call.

Although I have good friends in Denver now, I see them rarely and reach out to them infrequently. They have lives of their own and I often feel it is hard for them, when I call out for help, to comprehend how desperate is my need.

Most of the time for these last several months, I find it hard to hold up my end of conversations, and as though I have little to contribute that is original, amusing, beyond the routine. Wasn't I sparkling once? Fascinating even to myself?

My love life is achingly empty, as it has been for years. I try, bravely I think, to reach out to the one person who has so long remained my shining hope. He does not respond. That light, which has grown so small and flickering over the months, goes out and I am in the dark, grasping for a switch, desperate to believe my hope was grounded in something grand, and not merely a sad mistake.

In an effort to dispel the gloomy thoughts that swirl around me in my house, I wipe snow off the car and hit the lightly traveled, snowy suburban streets.

My unfashionable but sturdy Saturn moves without pause, studded snow tires biting into the snow with seeming appetite. I feel confident, taking pleasure as I always do in driving in weather that leaves others cowering in their homes.

Even the library parking lot, usually a bee’s nest of SUVs and sedans vying for close-in parking, is quiet. I dump a book, “The Dummies Guide to the Middle East,” and two movies – one 16-year-old sugary sweet and one 40-something depressing – into the return slot. Immediately, I find my second book choice from yesterday, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East Conflict” and grab it. I hope fervently that it, unlike the Dummies Guide, doesn’t make me feel stupid. How can anyone possibly read a book with such a title and fail to grasp what the author is saying? But I did it! Perhaps I should feel a sense of accomplishment? Then I move to the DVD stands in search of new movies. The DVD section is always popular. Even on this quiet day, four or five people stand in various spots around the two sections of selections, eyes roving the titles.

I am absurdly happy to find a vacant spot, an entire back side of DVDs no one else is purusing. Here, I can scan titles to my heart’s content, without worrying I am in someone’s way or waiting for someone else to finish. My joy is short-lived, however. A tall, blonde woman walks around the corner and stands slightly behind me, to my immediate left.

Even though I was clearly there first, she is scanning the titles in the same section, standing directly in my personal space. I feel uncomfortable and ridiculously resentful. I decide to stand my ground. Clearly, she does not know or is choosing to ignore library etiquette. Which loosely and nonverbally goes that when someone is perusing a section of anything at all, the second person should either stand far back and politely wait, perhaps even start reading a book they’ve picked up so as not to give the person any sense of urgency, or, best of all, move on to another section and come back to the other later, when the first person has gone.

Since she is not abiding by these simple rules, I squat there, peering at titles and occasionally grabbing a cover to read the back, far longer than I intended. I sense her resentment. But I stand firm, so long that she finally moves to another section. Or, more likely, simply finishes reading titles over my shoulder and moves on.

I feel petty but somehow amused. Doesn’t everyone think along these same lines at least once every day? Annoyed by the slow driver in the fast lane, who surely is not distracted or lost in thought, but driving there just to piss you off. Frustrated by the woman in front of you is writing, of all the archaic things in this world, a CHECK! Or is it just part of my misery, that I am so tied up in feeling bad I believe others are out to make me feel bad, too. Is this normal, or is this terrible?

Whatever it is, I know I am not alone, particularly at this time of year, in feeling pain. My divorced friend, new to my life in the last year, says her eyes filled with tears when she looked up during Christmas dinner, saw her happy, coupled relatives and felt overwhelmed by loneliness. Another friend’s mother cries over the phone to me on Christmas Day, beaten by fresh news of her daughter’s impending divorce. Three days before Christmas, another friend asks her husband to leave their home. The newspaper tells of a small girl dying on Christmas Day when she rides her new bike into the street in front of the family home.

My troubles are so small by comparison. The surface of my life a pretty package for which I should be grateful, but the loneliness underneath real.

In my core, I am optimistic, blindingly so. The best part of me hasn’t yet been tapped, I believe. It is waiting for me, the only one who holds the key, to open the floodgates and break it free.

I look up from this writing and see that the snow is still falling. I will find what I need to open those gates, and soon I believe. But not now. Now, at this moment, everyday life is calling. The driveway needs to be cleared, and I am headed for the shovel.