Thursday, June 25, 2009

"...then i'm movin' out."

"I miss my old life," her friend whispered.

Taking a deep breath (more to overcome the pit in her stomach than to process what she'd said), she replied,"So get it back. We're too young to be killing time already."

Except that you can't "kill time". She often wishes you could...she wishes that she could have murdered moments in cold blood and made the good ones last longer. One slaughtered month would have made way for a lengthened previous. But with the ability to kill doesn't come the power to resurrect, so she does her best to push those thoughts out of her head. What she should have said was "hiding" or "waiting" or "procrastinating". We're too young to be hiding already. We're too young to be waiting already. We're too young to be procrastinating already.

She was a hypocrite. She was doing all of those things.

***********************************

There was a night when she felt like the only person awake in the world and certainly knew she was the only person awake in the house. Looking around a dark room lit by store signs, street lights, and cars passing, everything took a form as deceiving as most things in your twenties turn out to be. Three children’s books leaned against what she guessed one could consider more "adulty" books. Side by side. As if there were no transition from the tracks little engines travel to the roads Kerouac did. Then ceiling. Shadows, books, ceilings. She spent what felt like forever trying to figure out if she could crawl in that little triangular space that’s created when two straight objects are leaning towards each other. She was convinced that if she could get in there, then it would all make sense. All the questions she had been wanting to ask would just be answered and she would never have to ask at all. Everything she wanted to hear would be said and then some. But she couldn’t fit in that space…of course she couldn’t. And she started thinking it may be time to stop choosing her experiences based on what she hoped could happen and start going by what the reality was.

But it was something real. Parts of it. All of it?

There is a place out on the island she grew up on along Ocean Drive where someone took the time to place line boulders to what seemed to be the middle of the Atlantic. Maybe a quarter of a mile…the distance is actually irrelevant. Whether you walk five feet into forever or 100 miles, it’s still towards forever. She used to drive by almost every day and wanted so badly to get out and walk to the middle of everything. And she finally did it about 4 months ago. She went out there. And she doesn't know how to not think there’s some merit to that. Something brought that on.

And now she needs a little bit of a break from the crazies to figure out what that was.

She doesn’t want to fixate on what could have beens or compare and contrast stories, because the truth is this:

We’re all going to have the same stories to tell.
We’re young.
We’re going out.
We’re getting drunk.
We’re getting inspired.
We’re getting fucked.
We’re getting hurt.
We’re getting smarter.
We’re getting less naïve.
We’re getting off.
We’re getting comfortable…

...and the terror in moving forward and moving on...the terror in not procrastinating, waiting, or hiding...is that you need to find comfort in all of those things. And she has no clue where to start.