Blank Slates
I’m a sucker for a blank slate. Five years ago, I moved across the country and started anew: new address, new zip code, new phone number. The numbers that once defined me for two and a half decades were now different, alien even. My space was mine to decorate, so I did: fairy lights, candles, fresh flowers and art soothed the pain of being away from familiarity. A different, yet same, sun shone in the sky. Harsher, more blinding. It bruised my skin: burned it, then bronzed it. After years of being pale moon glow, my shoulders became gold-flecked like my eyes. My bare arms gave way to ink that spread and sprawled, telling a story I won’t soon forget. Freckles popped up along my jaw like a new constellation. My hair lightened to a honey chestnut, I cut and dyed it ruby red (“it’s hair, it’ll grow back”). 2300 miles away from my past, from my safety net, I re-invented myself from the blank slate I was given and haven’t looked back.
I’m a sucker for a blank slate. I read once our cells regenerate every five years; the implication this brings lives rent free in my head. In three years my cells will have completely forgotten your touch, and with it, the idyllic mornings that were forsaken when you called it quits. Nobody talks about the one that leaves; just the carnage they leave in their wake. How one morning they wake up and everything you had together was no longer enough. The thing that nobody tells you about this? The poets, the song writers (we are especially guilty of this). When we are left, our pain is tangible and becomes a muse for us to sit with. Devastating heartache becomes some pop-y little ditty for other heartbroken to clutch onto like prayer beads. I’m guilty of holding onto illicit affairs like a life raft while I was awash in a sea of pain. Because when Taylor said “you showed me colors I couldn’t see with anyone else” and “for you I would ruin myself a million little times” no truer words had been spoken and until then it felt impossible trying to put words to a feeling that almost, should have, broken me.
I’m a sucker for a blank slate, but starting over - really starting over: packing my car, leaving behind that which does not bring joy, is terrifying and expensive. Traveling, to say, falling asleep in one city and waking up hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away, scratches the itch to start fresh without the commitment. Airports are transient; awash in a sea of people I’ll never see again, I will order the cranberry mimosa at 9am. It goes so well with truffle oil garlic fries and staring broodingly out at the tarmac. Hotel rooms offer a decadent impermanence: there is something about waking up in a city that I never plan to live in that motivates me to live the best version of my life.
Here’s the thing: I’m a sucker for a blank slate, but what if a blank slate is a state of mind? You don’t need to wait for the new year, for cell regeneration, or foreign cities to have a blank slate. You can start over whenever you want to. You just have to want it.
