ingnore the spelling mistakes...thoughts spilling out onto paper are not to be edited.

[trinitydawning]

I'm making a point to enjoy this time at home. For a while I was feeling so pent up but that's getting better, I have a plan now, and that's good, and I'm really just trying to enjoy every day. I was spending so much time thinking "Oh my god, I'm wasting this year." I was so worried that I was just flushing my first year out of school down the toilet because I was already in L.A. doing my thing. It occured to me the other day that what is most important that I am getting out of not having gone to college this year is time to recapture and re-experience all the wonderful things that meant so much to me in my childhood that I had let slip away over the last few years. I'm enjoying just spending time with my parents, I'm enjoying rediscovering the magic of the holidays. I am so glad I got to go camping with my dad again in Maine. I just suddenly realized that this is the last time I can really get to do all these things again. Had I not taken this year and stayed at home instead of going to school of moving away right off the bat I think I would have regretted not having this time with my parents. It would have been one of those things that when they're old or dead I would have looked back and wished I had gotten a chance to go camping again, or really be involved in the holidays. The past few years I got so fucked up and turned around, as we teenagers tend to do, that I lost sight of all the things that had mattered most to me for most of my life. I stopped doing the little things, like going to pick out the Christmas tree, or helping to decorate it, I stop going out for fall hikes with my dad, I refused to go camping. I just turned my back on all these really important traditions in my life. It has been so wonderful to get to re-capture them. I have finally stopped worrying about whether my friends think it's dumb that I'm spending so much time with my parents, people looked at me like I was nuts when I told them I was going camping with my dad for a week. No one got it. Honestly though I feel so lucky to just be able to take the time and find the beauty, wonder, magic, and memories in this season. Just because I'm not in the midst of my acting career, or getting training at some fabulous school doesn't mean I'm wasting time. To be frank I think that what I am learning and getting out of my life right now is far more important then the other stuff. L.A. will still be there when I make it out there, and college certainly isn't going anywhere, but I am aging, and so is my family. We are moving apart, my sister is never going to live at home again and soon I will follow and move away. Every year my extended family has a christmas eve party, but that is not going to continue for many more years, the cousins are aging and the less little kids the less reason to make a big thing of christmas, and the adults are finding ways to see eachother more around the year so the specific event of getting everyone together is less important. It was never even the best time in the world, but it was something that was always there, every year, and I looked forward to it for as long as I can remember. I am so glad I am home and I have the time to really enjoy the New England winter and really savor Christmas and the Christmas eve party. My family is takning a vacation to Hawaii this Jan. and at first I was pissed because it's my family and my sister's boyfriend, so everyone has someone there except me. Lately though I realized that that's okay with me. Peter is slowly but surely becoming part of the family and I get the sense he may be in it for the long haul so I want to get to know him better, and I am really looking forward to sharing this with my family. There is really only one person who I would want to bring with me because she too is family to me, but other than that I don't want the pressure of friendship there, I would only want someone there who would understand the desire I have to get the most out of this time was a family unit before we all scatter again.
I have recently been watching my 8 year old cousin fighting like hell to grow up. I remember what it was like to be her age and I was just like her. All I wanted to was be a teenager. It's interesting to think about how hard I was trying to grow up then and how now I find myself trying to hold on tight to the last shreds of childhood and enjoy them for as long as I can. This need to cling to past in a way is not out of fear of what's to come and being thrown into the "real world", but simply a recognition and rememberence of everything that was. I so badly want to slow my cousin down, tell her to just enjoy it, because one day she'll realize that her childhood is gone and she didn't even notice it ending, she didn't get to say goodbye. That is, I think, what I am doing. I am bidding a fond farewell to my childhood. I almost missed the train, it was speeding away and I had my eyes shut, but I opened them just in time and now I will wave until it disapears over the horizon, and then I will get on the next one, bound for the unknown, and had off in the other direction. Parting is such sweet sorrow...
A very wise person once said to me "Don't blink, you'll miss it". At the time I thought she was talking about Highschool, and since that couldn't have felt like ti was going my slower I thought she was way off base. I have since realized that she was in fact talking about the train, bound for memory and carrying my childhood with it. She saw me walking around with my eyes wide shut and she was trying to tell me to open them.
They're open now, as wide as can be, and I won't blink until I can no longer see that train.