every care that keeps you in your seat is a care that carries your defeat
Things are mostly really okay. But every so often I am not doing anything, and I'm letting my thoughts really wander, and then everything gets really weird. I think about how far away I am from everyone who's ever been important to me, how likely it is that I will never see many of them again. I think about how the winter is going to be. I am afraid of being lonely, and cold, and isolated. I am afraid of no one caring what I'm doing. This is a city, after all. There's freedom in no one caring what you're doing. But freedom isn't even close to what I'm after.
I miss Florida so much sometimes. My thoughts drift so easily to its purifying sunlight, its heavy rains, its vast oceans, which always made me feel like things were okay, like I was grounded. Loving so many people there made me feel grounded, too. No storm could have washed away what I had there. Even North Carolina: my roots were finally taking hold. I felt good, I felt happy, I felt like I knew where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be doing, and like I was taking steps to make my ideals into my reality, and like the people around me were taking well to it.
Here, my roots are skin deep. Most of my what-ifs (what if my car breaks down? what if I can't move something by myself? what if something bad happens?) are answered with money, now, instead of community. But money is not as stable as community: what if I do not prove useful to my new company? Or what if they do not prove useful to the world?
It's not good to be afraid of moving (on, up, out, away) -- but it is, I think, okay to recognize that money is not as good an anchor as love. This is putting me in a strange place, of course. The easiest way for me to accept what I am doing is to believe that it is just for a year, just an experience, just a way to make money/etc, and then I can go home -- but the truth is -- I have no home. There's nowhere for me to go back to. Home is shattered and still scattering across the country and the world.
Home is, of course, what you make it. I can, of course, make this my home. But of course, I do not want to commit to that: if nothing else, I have a disease that makes my body think I'm dying when I get cold -- so I do not want to live long-term in a place that gets this cold. I'm not, I don't think, holding out: I'm not keeping any more of myself from opening up to people than I always do. It's just that the knowledge that I intend to leave here within a couple of years -- and that I won't really have any place to go home to then, either -- makes me feel very solitary... disconnected. In more-or-less Kundera's words: like a shadow, without weight, no more meaningful than a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand Africans perished in excruciating torment.
I miss Florida so much sometimes. My thoughts drift so easily to its purifying sunlight, its heavy rains, its vast oceans, which always made me feel like things were okay, like I was grounded. Loving so many people there made me feel grounded, too. No storm could have washed away what I had there. Even North Carolina: my roots were finally taking hold. I felt good, I felt happy, I felt like I knew where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be doing, and like I was taking steps to make my ideals into my reality, and like the people around me were taking well to it.
Here, my roots are skin deep. Most of my what-ifs (what if my car breaks down? what if I can't move something by myself? what if something bad happens?) are answered with money, now, instead of community. But money is not as stable as community: what if I do not prove useful to my new company? Or what if they do not prove useful to the world?
It's not good to be afraid of moving (on, up, out, away) -- but it is, I think, okay to recognize that money is not as good an anchor as love. This is putting me in a strange place, of course. The easiest way for me to accept what I am doing is to believe that it is just for a year, just an experience, just a way to make money/etc, and then I can go home -- but the truth is -- I have no home. There's nowhere for me to go back to. Home is shattered and still scattering across the country and the world.
Home is, of course, what you make it. I can, of course, make this my home. But of course, I do not want to commit to that: if nothing else, I have a disease that makes my body think I'm dying when I get cold -- so I do not want to live long-term in a place that gets this cold. I'm not, I don't think, holding out: I'm not keeping any more of myself from opening up to people than I always do. It's just that the knowledge that I intend to leave here within a couple of years -- and that I won't really have any place to go home to then, either -- makes me feel very solitary... disconnected. In more-or-less Kundera's words: like a shadow, without weight, no more meaningful than a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand Africans perished in excruciating torment.