Home is wherever I'm with you

I have written and rewritten this certain entry many times over the past few days. They have all been slightly different versions of the same thing.

What I’m trying to say, what I’ve been trying to say is that I want to leave Boston.

There is a very distinct feeling I get every time I return to Boston after being away for a while. It’s taken me a while to sort it out, to identify it and give it a name but I’ve finally discovered exactly what this feeling is. It is my heart, breaking.

I often wondered about it as I sat in Union Station after a weekend with my family. All I could feel was an immense ache. I thought it had to do with what I was returning to when in actuality it had more to do with what I was leaving behind.

So this is what I will do. In 233 days from this blog post I will return to Connecticut. I will return to the people who gave me life so that they can help me sort out and clean up this haphazard life I have been leading.

It is the final step in a series of events that I did not originally know would lead me back to my parent’s house. I’ve let go of everything else that has kept me in Boston. I’ve stopped telling myself that I can find happiness on my own, here. There are no more stories to tell myself, no one to try to pretend to be and in 9 months there will be no reason to stay.

Trying to get something real by telling yourself stories is a trap anyway. It’s an addiction. We numb ourselves with stories because we imagine that the risk of being honest will be too painful to bear.

But what I have learned, after these past 2 years, is that nothing is more painful than sitting on a train full of strangers getting farther and farther away from the only people who really know me. The only people with the cure for my broken heart. I feel their love no matter where I am but now more than ever I need to see it. I need to feel it wrapped around me. I need to wake up to it in the morning and fall asleep to it at night.

I need to hear its song.

And I will learn the words and sing it back.

I Am An Island

Around this time last year I began to set sail on a journey that would bring me far from everything and everyone, including myself. I did not choose to leave but I also had no other choice but to leave. I left behind the old me, I’m still not sure who she was and I’m still getting to know this “new” me but I still think of that girl, and can see her waving to me from the shore as she gets smaller and smaller.

She doesn’t disappear though, that’s how I know I haven’t gotten that far. I can still see her, and part of me wishes I could go back to her. There was a sense of security I had during that time. I was sad, I was falling apart- but I walked around with a security blanket of silence that kept me protected. It was my secret. Now everyone knows…and I am still sad. I still feel like I am falling apart. The only difference is that it’s not my burden to bear alone anymore.

My mom said something to me on Christmas Day that upset me. She said, “Could you go back to school in January? Now all your friends are going to graduate without you.”

I was stunned when she said this. I thought I had already gone through all of this with my parents. Once again it comes down to a date on a calendar that everyone is looking to. It’s because my extended family asks about school when I see them and they all mention how I am graduating in May and I sit there giving them as little of a response as possible. I just wait for them to move onto the next niece, granddaughter, or cousin to probe. Christmas doesn’t really seem like the right time to announce such news. But then again it’s just another date on a calendar.

I think my parents have had this idea in their head that I would immediately get better and everything would be back to normal. Back to their idea of normal. What they don’t know is that I want to get as far away from the life I used to lead as possible. It wasn’t working for me. I made decisions I’m not happy with. I missed out on opportunities and as much as I try to live a life without regret I kind of mourn those lost chances. Which is just another way of saying I have regrets.

There was someone I wish I got to know better. I wish I gave him the time of day instead of giving preference to someone else. Now he is far away, on an island, and I am afraid I will never speak to him or see him again. Feeling like you have missed out on love is one of the worst feelings there is. If I could, I would take this little journey to his island and live out the rest of my days in the sun, with him. But I fear that I am too late. I let him go because I was unraveling and couldn’t hold onto anything. It’s so frustrating to be here. And by here I mean at this point in my life. In Boston. Here on my own little island that I built and not many people know how to get to or what to do with themselves once they get here. 

He’s in paradise and I’m in hell.

So I’ve got to start swimming.

First Snow

It's the first snow of the year so naturally all I can think about is summer. I love snow, especially the first one, but I love summer so much more. Allow me to reminisce...
My summer began deceptively well. I had just finished my first year of grad school and immediately went on vacation with my mom and sister to Rockport. It has become a sort of tradition for the 3 of us to spend a few days there at the beginning of summer. I collected a ton of sea glass, ate as much food as I could and hung out on the balcony connected to our room. Rockport is one of my favorite places to visit. After this trip I spent Memorial Day weekend on The Cape with the family of my roommate's friend and then after this I went camping with some of my friends. Yes, the summer began with a bang-  but then camp started.
I was working full-time as head camp counselor for a group of 30 7-9 year-old's, a group that I was just a counselor for the previous summer. After that first summer, I got camp amnesia and decided that I missed the kids more than I disliked the place so I returned with the promise of getting a promotion. Now I was in charge of a large group of kids and set myself on a one-way road to misery. I worked with incompetent people, in a group of children that needed more help than I could give them and we had very little resources to keep all these children entertained. One of the children was autistic, a handful of them had ADD and the rest were getting into fights or just not interested in being at camp. It was a nightmare. 
This is when this terrible, depressed, hopeless feeling began to set in. But then my weekends would come, and they were amazing. I spent them on my friend's dad's boat cruising down the Connecticut River past Gillete Castle and Chris Dodd's house and we would pull into a harbor and lounge on inner tubes with a Coors Light in hand. Or my friends and I would just drive around and go on adventures- looking for interesting trails or beaches, or they would come up to Boston and we would get Brunch at the bar down the street and then spend the rest of the afternoon on my building's roof which has a great view of downtown Boston. These weekends were my salvation and gave me hope that when this job ended, I would feel better. That this sinking feeling would go away and I would be happy again.
Of course, we know that this isn't how things went down. I was relieved to be done with the job but those feelings still stuck close, and got worse. But now things are changing yet again. It's been about 2 months since I made my decision to leave school and my life is moving forward at a snail's pace. But it's moving, so I'm...happy.

And now it's snowing. I'm glad for the change and that the year is coming to a close. It means that there is another summer coming up and even though this past summer wasn't all terrible it certainly could have had a couple more good days sprinkled in. So while the snow falls and Christmas nears, I'll be dreaming of a happy summer, with days that are merry and bright.

Haunted

 
I decorated for Christmas this past weekend. I know it's super early but I love the holidays and I can do whatever I want. The decorations are conducive to my mood as well. A Christmas tree adorned with white lights is perfect for sitting in a darkened room and staring off into. The musical box that plays Winter Wonderland and always ends on slow, sad drawn out final notes always hits the right chords within me. It almost seems to strain itself to try to complete the entire song. It never does though. It always stops short. So I turn the dial and listen to it again. 


I had another music box as a child that I loved. I guess I shouldn't call them musical boxes since the Christmas one is in the shape of an igloo and the one I had as a child was shaped as a little girl. She was in a light green dress splattered with dark green shamrocks and she played "When Irish eyes are smiling." I used to play it over and over as a little girl, trying to fall asleep in my dark, quiet house. It was a weird time. My parents had just gotten married and there were ghosts in my house. I would see their faces floating over my bed at night and I can remember the face of one of them. He was an old man with a very wrinkly face. My parents never believed me when I told them I saw ghosts. I remember being really scared though and I know that I have a very active imagination and a chemical imbalance but I don't think I am crazy enough to conjure up images like that. And I was only 4 at the time. 


My roommate and I have a vague fear that our current apartment is haunted but I'm not sure about it. She felt like someone was walking around her bed and she heard rustling in her closet. I haven't really experienced anything though. Except my bed would shake sometimes but it's against a wall so I couldn't tell if it was a ghost or the people who live downstairs. 

I think the only ghost in our apartment is me.
I just glide around from room to room searching for something I can't find. 
Quietly observing the world around me, wondering how I have gotten so far away and trying so hard to get back.

But most days are lessons in stillness. 
Sitting in darkened rooms. 
Looking into white lights...

In a dreamworld

I am quite, quite sick right now. Sick enough that I am kind of having hallucinations so don't expect this post to be very cohesive or coherent (I just had to look up if those two words actually mean two different things). I've had a sore throat these past few days, ever since my trip to NYC, but I attributed it to the hookah bar we went to. It was Daylight Savings time so we decided to repeat everything we did at 1a.m. so we got another round of margaritas and another hookah. I sucked that think down. I used to smoke in high school but I kind of just got sick of it and quite my Freshman year of college but I still smoke occasionally. It satiates whatever desire I have left. Anyway, this sore throat has gotten worse and now I am achy with a general all over sick feeling. I don't own a thermometer but I'm gonna guess that I have a slight fever. Once I said that I felt sick out loud was when I started to feel worse. I acknowledged it and it just blew up. Like anything in life really. "To call each thing by its right name."

I guess that's why they say the first step in fixing a problem is admitting you have a problem. Once you admit it, you own it. It becomes a part of you and something you can't deny and only then can you begin to move on. For instance, I just told my parents yesterday about what is going on with me. Usually those would be the first people you would call but I was nervous. This is a big decision and I just wanted to make sure that I had everything all figured out before I unleashed it all on my parents. My best friend had to talk me into it to be quite honest and I'm glad she did. I could have held off on doing it for a long time. But it was killing me that they didn't know and here I am writing about it on my blog and telling everyone else but they were left in the dark. It went well, as well as it could go, for what it was but I feel so much better now that it's out there. Now everyone knows. I've owned up to it all over the place and now I just feel...peaceful. Now everyone knows who I am, at this point in my life. I've got the troops behind me now. 

Back to the hallucinations. I'm not on anything and I've never taken psychedelics so I'm not tripping or whatever. I'm not seeing people or other worlds...I just keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye. This worries me because this is Boston and mice exist so there's that but I'm pretty sure I would really know if there were 4 or 5 mice skittering all over the living room. I imagine I will have some pretty great fever dreams tonight. As long as they aren't like the nightmare I had last night where I was stuck in a cage with a bunch of other people and a woman came with a machete and threw it into the cage and hit some other person on the head. Or more specifically, right in the face. I don't watch scary movies and I'm scared of the ghost that I'm pretty sure lives in my apartment so it really pisses me off when I have a nightmare because I try to stay away from anything scary. I think that dreams have meaning but I don't even try to interpret these dreams. Their only purpose is to scare me in my sleep as far as I can tell.

I love dreams though, good ones that is. I'm a daydreamer. I'm never bored because I always have something going on inside of my head. I've gone on many mental vacations. My roommate hates commercials and will spend those few minutes switching between channels but I see that break in a program as "me time." I can occupy myself with a few images of me in a new job, or just imagining me at a friends place in Vermont. I've got a very active imagination. So eight hours of just laying in my comfy bed dreaming is awesome. It's what I should go do now considering how sick I feel and I can feel myself slowly getting worse but these late night talk shows aren't going to watch themselves.

My rebellion

I got pulled over this weekend. I had just dropped my roommate off at the train station in New Haven and I was driving her car back to my parents house where it would stay until it was time to pick her up a few days later. I was coming up to a light that was yellow but I decided to just gun it and try my luck. Just as I passed underneath the now red light, I see a cop car to my left and say, "Fuck!" and immediately start to slow down. The car rolls around the corner and the red and blue lights start flashing. The police officer approaches my car and I see that it's a lady cop and she asks why my headlights are off. Whoops. I always forget to turn the headlights on in my roomie's car. In my old car, which my father donated to charity behind my back, the lights would turn off when you turned off the car and turn back on when you started it back up again. I'm still used to that I guess even though I haven't had that car for about 2 years now. The streets were well lit and I could see perfectly well so I had no idea that they were off. Then she told me that the light I passed through was definitely red and took my license and all the other stuff. There was a guy cop with her too and he was waving his flashlight all over the place and then he just stood by the side of the car. At this point I was worried that they thought that I stole this car. They keep asking me where I was coming from and I've got a CT license driving a car with a PA license plate that is not under my name.

So after like 20 minutes of the police officer just standing there and people staring at me as they walk by, lady cop comes back over and says, "Ok I am going to tell you what I'm supposed to do and then I will tell you what I'm going to do." Score. So then she goes through the whole speech of how much each fine would cost and then finally reveals to me that I am just getting a warning. The first time I got pulled over I wasn't so lucky.

Three of my friends and I drove to Miami for spring break out Sophomore year of college and we all took turns driving. We only stopped briefly at a hotel to shower and nap and mostly just drove through the night. On the way down I did quite a nice job of pushing the Saturn Ion we were driving to 120 to race some boys in Delaware and made it through the entire state in around 20 minutes and didn't manage to get pulled over. However, on our way back home I was driving the night shift and was cruising through Georgia. It was probably 2 in the morning and the roads were clear...just me and a cop. I was doing 93 in a 70 and got a citation and summons to court but I just ended up paying a hefty fine to avoid court. I don' really stress out over getting pulled over. I like to drive fast and I just kind of assume that I'm not always going to get away with it. But most of the time I do. In high school I used to push my car to 100 on the highway to see if I could get to the mall a few towns over in 15 minutes or less.

I was driving my parents car this weekend and my mom was with me and we were driving on this windy back road. I had never driven on these roads before so I was taking it kind of slow but then this guy rolls up behind me and he's not back there for more than a minute before he speeds up to pass me, crossing into the oncoming traffic lane and cutting me off. So then I'm pissed. There is nothing I hate more than someone cutting me off or implying that I am going too slow. So I started to ride his ass and my mom goes, "Mal stop following him so close, he could have a gun!" I laughed and said, "And he's gonna shoot me for tailgating him? That would be ridiculous." He ended up speeding up and basically drove in the oncoming traffic lane the whole time to cut off the whole line of cars that weren't going fast enough for him. 

I've always liked driving and I seem to be one of the few people who do. I was desperate for the independence when I turned 16 and being able to just get up and go was fantastic. This independence turned into me skipping almost 40 days of school my senior year and it was all due to having a car...and hating school...and getting into college in December so I didn't see the need to try anymore. I would pick up my best friend and we would actually drive to school but in the parking lot we would usually decide that today wasn't a good day and would instead spend our time at Starbucks or Barnes and Noble. Later on when I got caught and my parents found out my mom asked, "Why didn't you just go to her house and sleep?" We hadn't even thought about it. We liked to drive around. Go on adventures. See where the day would take us while everyone else was sitting in class. Now that I live in Boston and use public transportation I don't need a car but I miss driving. Speeding down the streets with the music blasting. I love that. I just walk fast now, but its not the same, even if I'm listening to my iPod. 

If I have somewhere to go, I want to get there quickly. I don't want to waste time along the way. That is what has been the hardest part about this whole getting better process. I just want to be better, to feel it instantly now that I have made all these changes in my life. But then I would be missing all that life has to offer along the way. So I'm forcing myself to slow down a bit. (I want to keep interjecting car metaphors like put on the brakes, sit back and enjoy the view, something about detours, scenic views, etc etc etc...but you get the point). Everyday is progress, everything that I am doing now is for me and will benefit future me. 

Oh and while I am talking about the future and cars...this past weekend I went to NYC for Halloween and some guy pulled up in a DeLorean dressed as Doc Brown from Back to the Future. He even had smoke billowing out of it. That's commitment.