the importance of being awesome.

I find myself here again, the odd and empty hopes I’m on your mind (or anyone’s) when you sip your roast and the chemicals in your brain fight the crisp breeze blowing my scent back north.

I’m back training my body not to sleep again. The hours I keep are once again getting eerie and the thoughts, even worse.

I was waking up in Brooklyn again with a sore jaw and my makeup on my arm, laughing at the 8am sounds of a jackhammer and horns blaring. I am so happy, I am so content. This time last year, I was second guessing and holding heavy onto any suggestion of solidarity. Now, I’m turning tickets on the turnpike in between tea and podcasts about tragic writers of the 20th century.

Ah, there you are, old friend.

I am grown, I am changed.

But I am still the same.

“I’m so familiar with this”, I thought. So familiar with leaning on your shoulder on the train and stumbling down Broadway laughing and thinking,

When the bubbles are carrying my courage, it’s easy to laugh. It’s easy let you act like a 16 year old boy who’s gotten into his parents’ liquor cabinet. The effervescent pseudo pride that takes me through flights and fights, through love and through loss. The crisp golden buzz that wraps me up in the warm.

It’s amazing how the dim yellow dead space of the subway can just suck all of the creativity and energy out of you. Coming up those stairs is like coming up for air from a bathtub full of freezing water in a florescent-lit bathroom.

I just like to stare.

I can hear everyone’s demons when they speak. I can hear every single inaudible quiver of their voice when they recite each word they’ve thought out in their beds at night. It’s my curse, or my blessing. I haven’t quite figured that one out yet. It’s kept me from people who are right for me, and from people who aren’t.

Yet it’s also drawn me to you. Every breath is:

“leave”

“run”

“no one stays”

But my heart is tugged a little closer to your fragile soul each time I turn around and see you glancing at me through the crowd of people, smirking at me, telling me a thousand things with your eyes. I know those eyes, and I know every scar on your face. I can picture every single one in my head. The one on your lip that reminds me of adolescence and the need to be needed.

I seem to prefer only what is painful, expensive, complicated, and rare.

Feeling nervous and sober and picking at the hem of my shirt (David hates that). Each thread I pull means another sinking, slow second has passed, and the knot in my throat makes me half way wish I could drink the champagne I left in the fridge. Staring at the dirty ceiling and praying for anything to distract me from having to say what I’m dying to say. Overanalyzing the corners of the room where the drywall meets the floor (how many times have hotel walls seen me vulnerable?). When you’re holding out for something, time seems to slow down and I can feel everything and nothing at all.

I guess I’d rather it be stranger’s walls than the ones I have to face each day while I pretend to be stronger than I really am.

It’s easy really, a quiet storm, or the waves on the shore, or Hemingway.

Anything or anyone who is so painfully poetic and silently destructive that no one realizes it until it’s too late. Until the tree has been destroyed, or the sand has all eroded away from the coast, or the heart has been broken and the bottle is empty.

War and Wilderness, Love and Loss.

It’s as if one day, you just woke up and decided to be a yellowed page in a sad and beautiful book that sits on the shelf until someone decides to take it down, dust off your years, and crack your spine in search of something deeper.

What’s really impossible is that you are filled with so many words that have been erased and written over that sometimes, it’s hard to decipher what’s leftover from the times before. When you let ink bleed back into the foreground, that’s when the voices of the past start to turn your gears backwards as you lay helpless on the pillowcase.

I have no way to justify my grip anymore, I have used all of my pretty words and sensibility to defend your actions. I’m not sure if it’s because I want to seem like the strong one, or if it’s because I don’t want you to look weak.

I guess it does’t really matter, because somewhere outside, buried in the snow and trodden under boots and tires, I left my “try” behind. It’s not as if I don’t want to, I just can’t. I’ve exhausted every single option that had ever come to me, while I stared out my window and pretended that this was all a screenplay or a scene from a movie with some beautiful and situationally appropriate music.

But it’s not, it’s me, with my makeup on my sleeve and my knees to my chest, because that’s all that I have left to do. It’s a tragic and hopeless situation that I don’t blame you for trying your hardest to get away from.

It’s so much more than bodies in a room.

Or numbers on a spreadsheet, or freezing your fingers off hanging posters, and paper cuts from tearing wristbands.

It’s more than kicking gravel on the side of the road and throwing your phone because this is the second flat van tire in a week.

More than waking up in a puddle of sweat in your bunk because the generator is out again.

It’s more than taking five to cry in the trailer because it’s all too much right now.

It’s more than counting tickets, or stubbing your toe on an amp, or your boots sticking to the venue floor after everyone is gone.  

Sometimes I feel like I have been going through a “quarter life crisis” for the past 4 or 5 years of my life. It was like one day, at 22, I woke up and forgot about any and all solid plans I had created, and started flipping through the proverbial “adulting” classifieds. Granted, my choices were not exactly categorized as the prime example of such. 

After leaving my high school era boyfriend after I drunkenly walked into a club in Baltimore on New Years Eve to find him making out with his ex (who spent a lot of time working on ways to ruin my life), I kind of began my strange and elaborate journey of “growing up”. 

I tried to sleep on the floor of my (still very dear) friend’s apartment that night, still in my sequined dress bunched up around my middle and some sweatpants watching his phone light up with texts from the aforementioned ex as well as an assortment of other girls. The next morning, I crawled into my Toyota Avalon, that was donned festively with two Baltimore City parking tickets- and left Maryland and my affinity for men who didn’t value me for quite some time. This would be the first of many mornings spent “leaving”. 

I became pretty good at leaving. I soon after acquired a tour bus, plane tickets, and train cars. All of which did their fair share of leaving one place or another. It was somewhat comforting because it was better to know I was leaving something behind when I didn't like it than to ever have to go back and face it again. I was a pro at ignoring things-it was just so easy. 

At some point between state lines I suddenly lost that ability. It must have fallen out of one of my many bags or flown out the window with a puff of smoke. It didn’t really hit me all at once though, it started to sneak in here and there. I would begin to notice things I hadn't before. The familiar irrational feeling I had when I used to think the school bus was going to leave me at school and I would be stuck there forever to become a casualty of whatever happened at elementary schools at night. Childhood anxiety however, does not translate well when one is in their 20′s. I started tossing around the “what am I doing with my life” scenarios while drinking too much. When people didn’t answer their phone I would immediately throw myself into a panic because they were OBVIOUSLY burning in a twisted metal fire in a ditch somewhere. My own mind wouldn’t let me free anymore. 

I suppose it just sat dormant for a while until I was ready to start learning how to really live with clarity. Until I had finished living some of the most dangerous years of my life so that the euphoria tube could be yanked out of my arm and the world became it’s true colors again. 

I dont want to sound like this was the beginning of my spiraling tunnel of mental madness. It wasn't. Some people never receive the figurative “wake up call” in life we all need to snap us out of our rose colored coma and make us start having some accountability. I know adult people who still ignore bills, responsibilities, and people who care for them just because it is unpleasant to face these things and they just don’t want to deal with that feeling. So, in a way, I am thankful for this long, dragging, “moment”. It could have spared me some lies, hurt, and death-but I’d say I am pretty keen on how I have turned out. 

Now, my point. My point is that the proverbial “quarter life crisis” was not instilled on us so that we could have pissing contests about it at the bar. Believe me, I love nothing more than a good bitch sesh about how incredibly stressed out of my mind I am about how I literally still, at 27, am not 100% sure about what I want to do with my life. Do I want to sell everything I own and move to an island off the coast of Fiji with Dan and Nancy and do cat yoga all the time and throw away our phones and computers so we never have to see most of you awful human beings ever again? Yes. Do I also want to open a management firm and help out struggling artists not get screwed over by major labels and live a successful life as a manager/brand rep/graphic designer/creative positive sunshine guru in this awesome market that is Richmond? Yes. Do I want to lay in the bathtub and drink two bottles of wine by myself? Yes. Sometimes, I feel motivated to do the positive things in my life. Sometimes, I am not. 

These times are meant to show us our own humility. These times are here because they make the moments when we cross off the last thing on our to-do list, the moments when we write an incredible script, or make a beautiful piece of art-worth it. Things seem so bleak these days. I know they do. I know that you-yes you-20 something scrolling through your Facebook feed-probably have laid in bed at least one night this week and sighed thinking “wow. The world really sucks. Why am I even trying?” or “I really know what I want to do right now. I have the tools. Why can't I find the motivation to use them right now?”

It’s because you had the euphoric tube yanked out of your arm and now you’ve stopped being able to ignore the unpleasant stuff in life. It means you’re doing it right. If you don’t have these feelings, then you don’t have something you’re passionate enough about. It means you need to get your ass up and find something that stresses you out because if it doesn’t then you aren’t invested enough. 

I will laugh at how you paint every feeling on your face so vividly that you could never keep a secret from me.

I will dance and twirl across the floor over our clothes until I fall right back into your arms.