the only thing that matters is just following your heart..
I'm growing increasingly anxious as the clock ticks away the hours I have left on Long Island. I don't know why I'm feeling this way.. honestly it's been more work than fun this time. I didn't get to do a lot of what I wanted to do, and part of me is relieved to be getting home and returning to my life there. But it's different this time, it's a different anxiety than I usually feel leaving Long Island. Because I'm leaving this house pretty much forever. My mother's coming up on Friday to pack up my sister and bring everything down to Virginia.. this is the end of an era. An era of being able to come and go as though I've simply been away at college. It's been so easy.. fly in, my car's here just as I left it, everything's right where I left it (including the food in the refrigerator - eww). It's been weird coming back, seeing the frantic writings on my desk that I wrote when high, seeing the state I was living in, seeing the people I knew.. but it's been comforting as well. Coming here reminds me of how far I've come, of how different a person I am than I was when I left here over a year and a half ago. Looking around at my old life and being able to remember with distance the immaturity and desperation of a hopeless teenager. It's been a slow process of getting ready to leave this place for good. Of saying goodbye to my dysfunctional family and dysfunctional childhood and all the comfortable pain that goes along with it. I knew my mom wouldn't stay here forever. I knew she'd get out, and take my freedom to come and go with her. I knew that's what's supposed to happen. But now it feels like it's all happened too soon, like time suddenly sped up to a gallop and ran racing off with the smell of summer on Long Island. I don't want to leave. Although a part of me is homesick for Florida now, because that has become my home. My own home. A place where my father's reign of terror doesn't exist. A place where I can heal and learn to live as an adult. Being here reminds me of my childhood, reminds me of cool breezes and pine trees and screaming for mom when there's a spider on the ceiling. Being there reminds me that I have places to go, things to do, and cannot spend the rest of my life remembering the childhood that never really was. It's time to grow up.