what are you running from?

about the me who lives out in the middle of the new england countryside, where i’m quite lonely, but i have a couple goats and cows and chickens that i look after, and i like to make jam and i have an enormous huge crush on my beautiful neighbor who trades me her honey, and i invite her over for tea a little too often to not be super obvious

the me who was born and raised in new york city, who’s sharper and angrier, yet still so kind, with a fire in her eyes and shards in her words, who lives in a awful gross 2 bedroom apartment with 4 other people and loves the people in her life fiercely and is obscene about her art and smokes too much and doesn’t sleep enough, ever, 

the me who went on a backpacking trip through europe after graduation with a desperate need to escape but it was a lot harsher than she thought but she fell in love halfway through france and lives in a tiny city with the love of her life and doesn’t talk to anyone she used to know; she still calls her mother sometimes, but no one knows where she is and she has never felt so free (she is still working on her french)

the me who is on the road to her first oscar, who manages to dodge out of all the gossip rags, who gets to do beautiful work in a city that she hates but she endures and she is not sure if this is what she wanted but it’s what she has so maybe she’ll run with it for now 

the me who lives in a tiny studio somewhere in stockholm, a me who paints and draws her nights away and spends her mornings kneading bread and folding dough for hours and hours and she never wears makeup and the city is both so busy and so quiet and she works as an english tour guide on the weekends at the palace (her swedish is almost perfect, though)

or you love the idea of math, of simplicity, of a language all can speak. but you sit down and they swim in front of your nose, taunting you. you spend hours hunched over a book reading the same two sentences over and over. walk yourself through kumon videos and wikihow and wolfram alpha. but it comes back with a “D” and you gotta just. know you tried and it didn’t work out, did it. this isn’t something you can manage.

there are worse dreams to lose, of course, than the what-ifs. but then you’re lying there half-drunk and saying “yeah, i loved ice skating but my knees gave out” “i wanted to run a bakery but with what startup money” “after he died it didn’t make sense to go to school anymore”. like you know that you never even had a door, that you only had a window to peek in and see a better land. like, you had a glimpse, and even while looking, you knew - this one wasn’t for you.