i think i want to tell the version of the story she told me not to, the meandering one that only makes sense in my heart, the one where somehow the girl who grew up counting the cars that we zoomed past in those compact cars tricked herself into thinking that someday we'd stop making out in the car and start proving everyone else wrong, the one where somehow all the roads led right here, the one where i ran away from what in retrospect was good for me and toward something less certain and never learned better, the one where i got hurt and didn't get over it, the one where i'm not perfect or likable or good but i'm alive, the one where i miss what i left behind but i can't bring myself to let go of what i came here looking for, the one where my mother's daughter is worried she hasn't come far enough.
or maybe it isn't that i want to, but that i have to, because the manuscript doesn't sing, it doesn't smell like cigarettes and the ocean breeze in the dead of night on the pacific coast highway, it doesn't glow like the sun on the way to beverly hills when i'm still caffeinated enough to delude myself into believing that was the best love story i'd ever had the privilege to write down. i wrote it and i read it and i put it away, mostly because every time i looked back at it i wished it was different, that i had a neat bow to tie up at the end instead of coming to the conclusion that what i have done for thirty years is drive in a circle and find a new way to fall for it every tie. i wished i had a different ending, and then i wondering if maybe it was still coming, if maybe i just needed to wait, so i drove north and west and south and east, across the country a second time, singing until my throat hurt while i used a bottle of sparkling water as a microphone, stood in the snow while a storm raged around me and whined that i just wanted to get to my hotel, let my eyes well up with tears for no reason whatsoever when the road opened up, got dressed over and over and over and genuinely believed that day it would be different, but the edits never came.
for months, for years, no words ran through my mind on the 10, no poetry emerged in a daydream as i stabilized my speed. i drove miles and miles and miles without pulling off to the side of the road to open this app. i went weeks without publishing a little secret missive to nobody, rode for hours while the bike stood still and never formed a single sentence. i didn't want to write the story the way it felt, so i stopped writing what i wanted next, sat still in my pain and wondered when it would pass, laid in front of the fireplace and hoped i'd eventually feel like myself again.
this isn't the first time, it's sort of always like this, i stand still and i watch the past recede and i get impatient for the next incarnation and brace myself for how unrecognizable i'll become to myself. and hear me out, because i blame all of this on the playlist, on the songs i kept in a bottle and sent away down the river of my heartache because i knew they would do this to me, fill me with sunsets and sepia-tone memories of something that was barely yesterday, make me want to forgive myself and everyone else along with her, compel me to finish what i started, remind me who i am. hear me out, because i don't know where i've been but i want to come back, because i can't explain what i've been doing but i know i don't want to do it anymore, because i'm burned out and tired and falling apart again and this time i really do want it to all be different when i find my way out.