12:31 AM
The past two weeks have been so lonely.
They had been interesting, but lonely. The familiar places seem drained of color without some familiar faces. This used to be home and I still feel like this is a homecoming of sorts but without the people, it's like coming home and finding the house dusty and empty.
I think of you as I feel my body ache and creak from too much sitting. I reach down to pick up the pen I dropped and I feel my shoulder slightly slide out from its socket. Pain shoots down from my shoulder to my back. It's been a year and a half since I injured that shoulder and it never fully healed. I remember the automatic concerned look on your face when you see me hold on to it when it gets sore. You feel - because you are, literally - so far away. You're home for the weekend and I'm in a cold classroom two and a half hours away. We're the kind of people who belong in both of these cities. We're the kind of people who knows every mile of the way to and from. The distance has become part of who we are.
We've spent years here together as we adopted this city as our own. Our shared hometown is what brought us together and our experience in this bright, overstimulating city is what kept us together. I left as soon as I can to work close to home while you chose to stay. For the past months, it has been me who waits for you to come home. Sometimes you don't and that's okay because if there's one thing I learned from you, it's that you gotta do what you gotta do and the best thing is to just let you do it. But because you weren't home often, you missed a lot of things I would have loved to share with you. And in those times, in my heart of hearts, I wished you home. I look out of the door and into the busy street and I wished hard for you to come home and walk through that door. You rarely did. I never asked why because I understood. I gotta let you do what you gotta do.
These past weeks, we find ourselves on the reverse sides of the equation and cities. I am away and you are home. You are the only person who knows what I am doing here in this big, bad, city and I know you understand that I gotta do what I gotta do and you'd just have to let me do it. You did not show signs that you would be sad not to see me, just encouragement and support written all over your face. But maybe it wouldn't be too long of a stretch to imagine that maybe you wish me home too; that maybe you'd come along something that you would have wished to share with me and it'll make you wish that I was home. When this happens to you, you'd finally know what it feels for a moment to be half as precious because you don't have someone to share it with.
These past weeks, we did not share the geographical space of any of our cities. I arrive as you leave and I leave as you arrive. We are currently preoccupied with the things we have to do for ourselves. But one thing is for certain. We both wish to be home as soon as we can. We like to be home for as often and as long as we can. I don't know about you but you're now part of the place I call home. Home means spending time with you and our friends. You can't make homes out of human beings - I know. But home is where the heart is and it would seem that I left some part of mine with you.
6:53 AM
Well this has been a hell of a week, with the Brexit and all. It feels like departures are all the rage this week.
In the midst of the June 22 Earthquake Drill, a minor, if welcome, tremor shook my life. I received news (from the unlikeliest source) that I got accepted into graduate school. Grad school has always been a "maybe yes, maybe no" thing for me and applying to it was something I did for myself; partly out of spite, partly out of boredom. The moment I saw my name on that website, I felt the proverbial sands shift under my feet. It's like starting UP all over again. Excitement, anxiety, and a whole heck of nervous jitters washed over me like some emotional version of the Ice Bucket Challenge. As I read that acceptance email, I felt like an astral projection, watching over my own body go through a raging torrent and wildly trying to catch up with it. I guess that sums up this week pretty well: Me, watching the world and myself change while desperately trying to catch up and cope with it.
It's not that I want to hold on to the way things were. I just keep stumbling and falling over myself, trying to process the speed of how things change. Going back to the title of this post, it's like the sands shifted and opened up like quicksand and I'm being sucked in at breakneck speed. I am flailing and floundering but I accept that I will continue sinking. It boggles my mind that I somehow feel that I am not the same girl who was sitting on the beach just last week. I am no longer the girl who waxed emotional to her friends over the speakerphone last last Friday night. There's a part in me that is both impressed and alarmed at how my psyche ruthlessly transitioned to a completely foreign state of mind in a matter of days.
Getting into grad school was a trigger for an internal restructure within me that I was barely conscious of. You know when you meet up with a friend and you become aware that something's changed in that friend since the last time you met? Wasn't it a bit disconcerting? Well, that's what I felt last night except that the friend was my own goddamn self. I've always struggled to care less about everything. I just ALWAYS give a shit. But that night, I slipped into indifference like it was a second skin. It bothers me that I did it so effortlessly with ice-queen poise. When did I stop caring, especially for something I've cared for too much before? Could it be that I am now too preoccupied to give a fuck? Is it a win or a loss? Have I finally stopped caring and consequently, saved my sanity in the process? Or have I stopped caring because things are going to shit and I just sorta saw a way out and bailed like the scared little girl that I am?
This is a very schismatic existential moment. For weeks, I wanted a cure for my loneliness and hopelessness. Now that the medicine is before me, I have no doubt that I want it but this was not the way I wanted to go. You can choose closure but you can't always get it the way you want it. Emotions, feeling, and caring keep me feeling alive. It keeps me human. Losing these emotional lines that have been so saving and defining to these years is scaring me. Maybe I was wrong to think I could have it all. That's not far off as it has been a year of wrong assumptions. I just want myself back. I just want to be kind and loving again. But it seems like I can't anymore. In these changing times, I feel that it is time again to harden up and tough it out. I can't seem to find that balance between kindness and honesty; or emotionally available and unflappable. It just doesn't work that way for me. I keep steeling myself against people leaving and relationships changing but the only thing I accomplish is making sure they do. But what was I supposed to do? Hang on until they're clearly not there anymore and ask them to come back for me? I keep telling myself that people always leave until they decide to stay. Even in the arms of these people; even while looking into their eyes and laughing with them; I am so painfully aware that they will someday leave. And somehow, I manage to respond to this awareness with the emotional maturity of a passive-aggressive temper tantrum: I'm leaving you before you leave me. It feels right in a self-righteous, self-saving kind of way but the people I care about always call my bluff and I am left with nothing but my achievements and my intact pride.
Lin-Manuel Miranda posted this poem on his Facebook page:
The world changes.
The earth spins.
We grieve our losses.
We eke out wins.
And so the world does. It goes on. It does not stop. I once wrote that Life does not and will not stop for anyone. It does not always go in a pace that I am comfortable with. We win some, we lose some and sometimes it's just all too much. This has been a breakdown that has been so long coming but so gracefully executed. The sun has set on the longest summer day. The smell of summer lingers, the fire trees have yet to flame out, but the rain has come. The past year has been nothing short of amazing and the emotional connections and feelings were nothing short of honest, real and eye-opening. But things have begun changing around here. Life goes on for them, even without me. Life goes on for me, even without them. I know no one can stay in those green plexi courts forever, even if this feels like quickly ripping the band-aid off a very raw wound - it's most painful after the fact but at least that shit's over and done with. To end this long and very rambling emotional breakdown, I again borrow words from my man of the moment, Lin-Manuel Miranda:
Sigue andando el camino por toda su vida
Respira
Y si pierdes mis huellas que dios te bendiga
Respira
Keep walking along the path of life
Just breathe
If you lose your way, God will keep you
Just breathe
