2015.
I just went through some of this old tumblr in a fit of nostalgia. Timing seems right. I seem to have left off in love with my best friend, and about a month ago was the last time I spoke to him, maybe forever. Certainly for a very long time. College is not what I expected and I mean that in ways both bad and good. The town is fine, but if I’ve learned anything from being here it’s what I don’t want. So I’m graduating a year early, a year from next month. I currently have two jobs and am applying for a third so I can pay for my study abroad trip in Madrid this summer. When that ends in July, Boyfriend is coming to meet me and we’re going to take a road trip through Italy. Florence, Rome, and the Amalfi Coast being the major stopping points.
I think a lot of what people say about college just doesn’t apply to me - or at least it doesn’t apply to me in the context of this particular university which, upon coming here, I knew wasn’t exactly my sort of place. But I read something, probably on tumblr years ago, about college having this habit of stripping away the person you pretend to be to reveal the person you are. Maybe it’s not so much the institution as the age, but still. There are some things that I just haven’t been able to keep from happening. Some instincts, some compulsions, some loves that are not easily set aside. I am learning what is inherent to myself as a person, what stays no matter how often I shed old skins.
I still miss so many people. I’ve shed people even faster than I have identities and the most recent one is a loss I haven’t really come to terms with yet. It was necessary, inevitable, the purging of toxic bullshit I needed, but still. I loved him for years in all sorts of ways. I still do, always will. There are a lot of people I still love. Friends who slipped away. I wonder about them all the time. I wish them all the best.
So here I am. I guess the above doesn’t make it sound that way, but I am somewhere good. I still feel like I’m grasping at air when I think about the future, but that’s ok. I was on the phone with my boyfriend today and he reminded me that he had a fucking mortgage when he was twenty. Now he owns a god damn house. We’re not even that far apart in age, he’s in his 20s, it’s just a fundamental difference in our natures. Sometimes I wonder if that will keep us from staying together. He is so calm and so grounded and I am so unsatisfied, so hungry. But at the same time, his consistency and sense of duty is the perfect complement. I get so distracted by fantasy, he is driven by decisive action. I envy him for it. And it’s good to have around me, especially since he is so encouraging. I guess it’s just that I’m not used to this sort of stability. I have spent years off and on in this volatile relationship with someone who would never communicate fully with me. There is no work with this one, it’s the slowest burn. It’s comfortable and tender and I don’t know if that’s good or bad or if it needs to be either. I’m still feeling it out. I think maybe my thoughtfulness about it shows some sort of personal growth, but maybe not. Either way, he’s a lovely person. I’m fortunate that we picked each other. We’re good together, we support each other, we have spectacular, spectacular, sex. I’m not restless. I just don’t really know how to respond to something so....functional.
I’ve gotten a little stranger too. Or, I’ve become more comfortable with my strangeness. I’m planning a trip to Saudi Arabia after I graduate to stay with my best friend and her family. She goes back home for the summers. I still drive the same car my father taught me in. The same one I used to skip school to go on long aimless drives after he died. The same one I drove across the country with my sister. The same one I snuck on my boarding school campus and drove to college in. The driver’s side window doesn’t roll down anymore because of an accident and there are boxes of kitchen stuff I don’t need in the trunk. They were my grandma’s and my aunts tried to pawn them of on me but we don’t have any room for them in the apartment. I finally brought my Washington state license plates inside. They’re on my wall now. One is perfect and new but the last registration sticker says 11/2013. It was on the back. The other, the one from the front, is worn and bent with paint chipping off. It’s dirtier too, but I didn’t want to clean it. Around them are postcards and letters and the infographic of the Ashtanga primary series and three covers of the New Yorker and two poems and a 1/3 finished mural that I started in October.
I don’t have any furniture except my mattress, box spring, and a clothes rack, so all of my books are stacked up against a wall. There’s a picture of my dad and I, framed, sitting on top of John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle. There’s a flask covered in purple glitter tilted to lay across Maya Angelou’s Letters to my Daughter, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, and Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. There are candles and bottles of pink and red nail polish and papers, so many papers, mostly school, but some personal notes. My social security card. Bracelets my grandma bought for me when my dad was still alive. Business cards - mine, strangely enough. Yoga blocks and a strap, a plate with dried paint I was too lazy to clean off on the bottom. A bag of tea, some ribbons and tape, a box that came with lingerie in it, courtesy of the boyfriend, that I keep sex toys in. Hiking boots and rain boots and nail files and hair pins and scotch tape and a check book and blank CDs. There aren’t any sheets on my bed and I don’t particularly care. I did my laundry yesterday but never quite worked up the energy to fold it. I have a jar of change that comes in handy toward the end of the month when things get tight.
I visited my father’s grave yesterday. His tombstone is a bench, half of his ashes buried underneath in the Appalachian mountains. The other half are in the desert out west. It was grey but warm and the mountains were beautiful and the birds were talkative and there weren’t many people around. I sat there for an hour. I talked to him, but it didn’t help much. I kept asking him to please come home. Its been three years and I’m still asking. When I tell him about my life it feels like I’m talking to emptiness. But then I started to hum, to make a small beat with my palm against the side of the tombstone, and I closed my eyes and it helped. And I started to sing and it helped. Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah. It’s my go to for comfort, not to listen to but to sing. I’m not a big singer, I won’t do it in front of other people, but there is immense comfort in that song. It was a few moments of abandon and some of the purest catharsis I’ve ever felt.
Life is full of choices as long as life persists. My dad wrote that and it stuck to me. It’s obvious, I guess. But there’s something about the use of “persists” that just kills me. I keep making choices, and I think most of them have been bad. Well not bad, but not optimal. But that makes my life sound like something that needs optimizing and I’m learning to appreciate it for all of its messiness. That’s the why of it all, right? Even as a kid I had trouble believing in a higher power but not in pure and unfiltered love and feeling. The wildness of it all. The fact that it even exists to begin with.
I’m somewhere messy right now. I think that’s the point.
