The Things That Make Us Richer

"I lower the window. The warm salt air whips the hair off our faces, bringing with it the promise of our summer and more flights landing, more compatriots returning, the city once again infused with amity and opportunity, because we're only twenty-four for fuck's sake.

I tuck my Palm safely back in my purse, one souvenir housing another. Suddenly the dark sky is ablaze with Memorial Day fireworks, a glorious burst of pyrotechnics shimmering over the water, making a blurred rainbow as we barrel over the patched tar. I nudge Kira awake, "Look." She grins, the lanes clear before us as we accelerate." - Citizen Girl, McLaughlin & Kraus

The paragraphs transcribed above are the last in the most recent of my literary conquests, Citizen Girl, a well-timed gift from April. Although I found myself irritated through most of the book, April's guess was right, Girl probably is the "kind-of, maybe, sorta, surreal [me] of the soon future." Or maybe the even sooner present, and even the not so distant past. It's no coincidence that the passage that appealed to me the most was the passage with the most perspective, the most wisdom, and the most distance from the crap of Girl's everyday life.

It's easy to get bogged down, or caught up, or really terribly lost in the crap we deal with every single day. One of the few odd sayings that I've hung onto in my few short years is 'life is what happens while you're busy making plans'. Too often I let the battle of the future and the present get explosive, way out of hand, and far too off-balance.

Despite 'knowing' that I shouldn't let plans for the future get ahead of the present, however, I consistently fail to find the appropriate balance between what I should be or am doing now and what I should be or am will do in the future. The result of this ambiguity in my life, of course, is stress. Stress about what I'm doing wrong, stress about what I should be doing differently, stress about how it is all undoubtedly going to damn me to a future in a burger joint or a temp agency or, most likely, a high security asylum.

I'd like to conclude with some sort of hopeful solution for my future, some compact panacea, but I simply haven't got it. This isn't one of those Sarah has to have the answers moments, though. I know I'm going to spend the rest of my life constantly negotiating between the situations I find myself in and the life I wish to live. In the meantime though, during the few short breaks I take from my everyday, I'd like to leech every moment of clarity and bleed it dry, hoping to bottle for a few lasting moments the magical stuff of clarity, of perspective, and of calm.

Faire Face

Sometimes when you face what you, or others, or you and others think is your worst fear, you become acquainted with much deeper, darker, more insidious and intimate fears. Sometimes the fears that emerge as you battle nemesis are mundane, cliché, even pedestrian. Sometimes they are both, and sometimes you think you are not the only one, you're just the only one weak one.

I am afraid of failure. Sometimes you need to shut the fuck up, because if you feel this way, then what is everyone else supposed to feel? No, it's not easy playing the wünderkind. It's not so easy to play anyone else either. I am afraid of becoming more and more like my mother. Sometimes you're just like everyone else in the world. Sometimes you're not. Sometimes you need to take stock of what you have, what you can learn, and what she has to offer. And sometimes you should go see a shrink. I am afraid of fading away. Sometimes you and the rest of the world are right on par with your narrow-minded senses of self. Sometimes you miss the bigger picture. Sometimes you forget that you are still only twenty. Sometimes it doesn't matter, because you don't know how to make the panic go away, and every time you think about how much you have to do in one short lifespan you shrink away and wonder how anyone is brave enough to take on this world.

Sometimes you need to see things for what they really are. Sometimes you think of that episode of Buffy and wonder if that's how it really is. Sometimes that has nothing to do with your neuroses, its just an entertaining fantasy... and... uh... sometimes that points to a deeper problem. Sometimes the most frightening things in our lives are not our fears, but their consequences, their implications, their repercussions. Sometimes these repercussions are what we really fear, and we are simply incapable of putting a name and a face to those fears.

Sometimes we need to do it anyway.

I am not afraid of failure. I am afraid of not accomplishing. I am not afraid of becoming more and more like my mother. I am afraid of inheriting (only) her weaknesses. I am not afraid of fading away. I am afraid of never making a difference.

Sometimes you try to close a chapter without knowing the ending. Sometimes you lie and tell yourself you can move on with your life without seeing what comes next in your small sagas. Sometimes they eat away at you all the same, underneath the surface, or crawling slowly across it. Sometimes you live your life just to validate your own existence, just to make yourself feel better about all the things you let fall away. Sometimes you're selfish and a child and no amount of reassurance will make you stop asking for more. Sometimes you need to take the time to live out the pain, live out the tragedy, live out the reality of having to deal with a new reality. It's just that time. It's just that way. There's nothing left to do but stand and stare at your contortion-act life, letting your heart pound and your tears stream as it twists and bends all the way off the plane that you thought was the ideal you. Then you sit, and you take a moment, and you lie flat, and you start to reconstruct. You build your new horizon and you make yourself proud. You do it because you have to, or because you can, or because of whatever else might lie in between. You do it for yourself, and you do it because the only choice we have in life is to just keep on living, because our lives are all we really have.



Postscript

Ha.

And sometimes the only person who can stop the pain is the only person who won't. Sometimes the only thing you feel you can do is to swallow and move on, but when that panic creeps up, when your neck and shoulders tense and you feel that familiar knot in your chest you suddenly find yourself thinking

"Emotional bulimia would be nice."

Sometimes you wish you could induce, expel Mark Salter from yourself, and flush him down a toilet.

My Gift to You

Take one part fatigue, one part writer's block, and one part forgetfulness. Stir. There you have it. A desperate measure. In an effort not to get dropped from April's blogroll, I am posting pre-emptively. A real, respectable post will be added soon, hopefully later today, shedding light on my two month absence.