Cycles

I may have forgotten what I wanted to say, but I am going to try and say it anyway. I've lost many beautiful thoughts to time and forgetfulness. I've lost innumerable words in between the tiled walls of swimming pools. An hour ago I lost beautiful thoughts to a highway. I can't get them back, but I can try to mimic the feeling.

I was home. I had gone home to spend time with my childhood friends. My house is falling apart. It is falling apart on the inside. There was a small flood on the second floor and now things have been moved and are out of place. It is, disconcerting. Mostly so because when I go home now, usually, no one else is there. On vacation or working. So I am alone, again, in my house, wondering what could have caused its newest injuries. My mind wanders to unhappy places--unlikely events but still unhappy.

But besides the house, it is my neighborhood. My dreams will always take me back to the way it feels to be driven down my street, or to drive oneself at the age of seventeen--speeding again, cocky as fuck. I could navigate around my block blindfolded, I know it so well. But it isn't really my neighborhood anymore. It is changing. There are a new batch of elementary school kids now. I don't know them, I don't know where they came from, but they look cute and bored. I imagine that's how I looked when I played with my neighbor from around the block, when we were only nine or ten. Bored. And there are new neighbors now, too. Parked in driveways are cars I've never recognized before. There are dogs being walked that I haven't seen. It is a slow change, like how both of my parents have allowed their hair to thin and gray just a little longer before dying it back to their unnatural blonde and brown. It makes me uncomfortable to realize time has passed. I want to be able to tell myself that I've come a long way, but maybe I haven't. Maybe I'm still that miserable little girl and I just can't see that through all the drugs I'm taking. I try not to think like that, but I'm just so terrified that I'm going to fall back into the little kid I once was. I was once a little kid who needed someone, just one person, who would not leave her. I would like to think that, as flawed as I am, I have become the person I needed, just ten years too late.

And so when I drive around my house, nothing seems right. I don't know how I fit into the story anymore. I don't see myself living in the house. The house with the little plaque on the door to that reads, "Bless this home and all who live in it," a sentence that taught me irony through years of experience, a sentence that made me laugh even when a natural human response would have called for crying. I have no home anymore. Even the two things that made life bearable no longer exist there: my sisters have left. I have nothing. I have no one. I have no place to be. I just have myself. For the first time, that may actually be enough. It is terrifying.

It would be grand if I could pick one of the happier days of my childhood and reside in there for as long as possible, if time could move more slowly so that I wouldn't be constantly fumbling over my identity crises. So that when I go home I don't feel unease, but instead sense a continuity between then and now. But no. No, time is a bitch. I am still not old. I have held onto a lot of anger, seeking proper avenues for its expression, and I will hold onto it for just a while longer. But if I wait to long, there will be no one left to take it out on other than myself. And that is terrifying. If, as an older person, I manage to feel this same abject loneliness and diffuse melancholy... But that is still a long way aways. Just as the time between me driving a Barbie, battery-powered jeep and me driving an actual, engine-powered convertible crept slowly in reality but in reflection passed suddenly, I am hopeful that I will remember this time, around age 22, as being something of an important stage in my life.

All the things I have forgotten should remain that way.
All the things I remember should try to fade.
The only thing that was ever important was knowing who I was.


(ELYSE! If this sounds depressing, don't worry about it. You can just call me instead.)