what i'm trying to say

We lived in a rambler, tan, with a lawn like a pickled grub from the Amazon, tended to by my father like the needs of his own children. In the winters it was cold, sometimes in the way that your blood would slip out into your shoes during the ten block walk to class. And, in the summers it was like an oven with gnats trapped inside it. The structure might have been there for a long time, but it wasn’t. The value of the land will soon outweigh the value of the house. It was ours, though. Our home, together, somewhere between lakes and highways, in a state that grabbed us and held our bodies to the soil.

I knew I would be here for a long time. When I was young I counted ages by years in school. When college came, I chose to stay. I hated grade school except when we had a roller skating unit in gym. I hated high school except when we went on field trips to the science museum. Now things are different, and hindsight is 20/20. I wish I would have left to do the things I need to do by myself. Sometimes, at night, I still creep upstairs to my mother’s door. When I am sick, I collapse on the couch, and when I am worried, she talks me down out of panic. But who would I be if I didn’t have her at my disposal? Where will I be when I don’t have her anymore? How will I stop when I wake up shaking like a wind-up toy? I want to know. I want to know this.

We watched things change. My mother went grey and my father left the republican party. My sister fell in love with a boy she wrote about in high school. He stays nights in her bedroom. They cook together; only enough for the both of them. I fell in love with someone I may never have. Maybe they love me too, I think. I know he does, but the distance between us tells him otherwise.

One day I’ll pack a suitcase. I’ll pack my paxil and my blanket and my shot classes and I’ll get on a plane. One day I’ll land in that city and make it mine. I’ll be as pretty as the wild ones that only come out at night. The ones who work in dives and fuck him when I’m not in town. I’ll pull my suitcase down through the SOMA to Powell, all the way to the Embarcadero, where I’ll walk to the end of pier one and throw it into the bay. I’ll get rid of me, because it’s not enough. And one day I’ll be alone, in one of those dives, drinking rum and he’ll walk in and introduce himself to me.

What I’m trying to say is, when you’re in a place long enough, away from someone you need to convince, it might try to define who you are. The cold, the people, the way your car feels on the roads, or how you anticipate melting into your bed at night to dream of the place you need to be. What I’m trying to say is sometimes giving up on the things you think you know is the only to get home.