(no subject)
I am home. It feels strange to call it home. I no longer mind being in Fremont, so long as my stay is short and departure imminent. The long-lived bitterness I harbored for this place has mostly dissipated, and I am left with a latent sadness for the childhood and adolescence I lived in this colorless, characterless town. It is most strange to see people who I once knew, who once knew me. I find myself suddenly and unexpectedly apathetic to them, or their opinion of me. It has become very clear that they have no idea who I am or was, and it's liberating in a way. I have changed as I never thought I would, and I am absurdly positive about who I am becoming, perhaps for the first time since childhood. Those places in my hometown that I once looked upon with bitterness, or anger, or regret no longer perturb me; the mistakes I made here have not ruined me. I may be stronger for them. There is little, now, looking back, that I would do differently.
The mimosa trees and sidewalks and street names have lost their edge on me, and I find I can remember without wincing, finally.
My room feels as though it no longer fits me; the clothes hanging in the closet are either too small or too unlike me, and the bed is too small. The blue walls no longer suit me, and when I open the books in the shelves old snapshots of people I no longer know or can't even remember fall in my lap, like forgotten pressed flowers. I've only been gone for three years, but it seems like its been years and years, five, ten. Driving past the high school at lunch, the students look like children and I am shocked by their youth. We thought we were adults, didn't we? It is unimaginable to me, how we could have seen ourselves as anything but children. Not to say I am an adult now; looking at all of the time I have yet to live, twenty seems awfully and almost absurdly young, still. Almost twenty-one.
Sitting here in my too-small bed in my Alaskan Ice Blue room, I can hear the band practicing across the creekbed and the wind in the gray-blue pine that used to touch my window at night, before they cut it back. I still know where every fruit tree is, avocado to banana, and where the nasturtium grow best in the shade upstream. I know what the houses looked like before they were remodeled, bursting anew from the ground like beige-stucco mushrooms after the rain. I remember the games I played in the backyard and picking snails from the leaves of the agapanthus, and listening to the far-off train whistles at night. I am starting to weed out the good from the bad. I wonder who I will never see again - who I will forget entirely. I wonder what I'll remember of this place in ten years, once my parents have left Fremont along with most everyone I ever knew here. I am not so afraid to forget anymore. I am not so anxious to, either. I think I may be on my way to being okay.
The mimosa trees and sidewalks and street names have lost their edge on me, and I find I can remember without wincing, finally.
My room feels as though it no longer fits me; the clothes hanging in the closet are either too small or too unlike me, and the bed is too small. The blue walls no longer suit me, and when I open the books in the shelves old snapshots of people I no longer know or can't even remember fall in my lap, like forgotten pressed flowers. I've only been gone for three years, but it seems like its been years and years, five, ten. Driving past the high school at lunch, the students look like children and I am shocked by their youth. We thought we were adults, didn't we? It is unimaginable to me, how we could have seen ourselves as anything but children. Not to say I am an adult now; looking at all of the time I have yet to live, twenty seems awfully and almost absurdly young, still. Almost twenty-one.
Sitting here in my too-small bed in my Alaskan Ice Blue room, I can hear the band practicing across the creekbed and the wind in the gray-blue pine that used to touch my window at night, before they cut it back. I still know where every fruit tree is, avocado to banana, and where the nasturtium grow best in the shade upstream. I know what the houses looked like before they were remodeled, bursting anew from the ground like beige-stucco mushrooms after the rain. I remember the games I played in the backyard and picking snails from the leaves of the agapanthus, and listening to the far-off train whistles at night. I am starting to weed out the good from the bad. I wonder who I will never see again - who I will forget entirely. I wonder what I'll remember of this place in ten years, once my parents have left Fremont along with most everyone I ever knew here. I am not so afraid to forget anymore. I am not so anxious to, either. I think I may be on my way to being okay.