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.
