It’s the 28th of January, which happens to be a Saturday, and I (mistakenly) believe I have missed the last bus home. Somehow, I am okay with this. I start to walk home, and do not stop, even when it dawns on me that the last bus will arrive in twenty minutes. Walking feels good. It feels good to be alone and only marginally aware of the time and my greasy make-up and other people. My body knows the way home, even though my family only moved here two months ago.
Family. It’s complicated, isn’t it? Sometimes it feels like it belongs in the very core of your being, sometimes it feels like an appendage you don’t fully understand. Growing up, I constantly felt like they were breathing down my neck, too controlling, too dysfunctional. And at the same time, they were so perfect and warm and the only place I felt I could keep my heart. I turned twenty last year, and that binary seems to have melted into a spectrum of feelings and memories, not all of which I understand. Kid me never thought I’d get to this point where living with my parents just feels like being a person living with other people. Maybe it’s agency, maybe it’s love. Sure, there are gaps here and there – my mom still doesn’t want me getting any more tattoos (and so I don’t) and my dad still asks me to keep my room clean (and so I try) – but on the whole, my family feels like a home more than it ever did before. Even though we talk less. Less interrogations, more unsolicited honesty.
Does this make sense? (Maybe it doesn’t have to.)
I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want from my past and my future. Right now, I tell everyone I’m not sure what I want, because that is at least half true. I’m not sure what I want, but that’s because I’m finally really looking at the options that I have. After god knows how many years of pigeonholing myself or just not thinking about the future because I didn’t think I had one, a small part of my heart is slowly opening up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there are days and months and years ahead of me. It’s a funny feeling. Like discovering a mole you never knew you had. I guess in my heart, I know that a certain sense of melancholy is etched into my DNA, and maybe that flair for the dramatic will follow me everywhere I go, but I’m learning about balance. I feel cautiously optimistic – it feels like the riptide of life and feelings and experiences is finally bringing me back to shore. I feel a sense of groundedness that I guess I wasn’t expecting right now. Being surrounded by art makes me feel like everything will work out. The insecurity is still there, but it’s started to feel less like a blizzard and more like a light fog. I don’t feel like I have to stop for them anymore. I feel like maybe I can fix them as I go.
This is all very much an incoherent train of thought. But it has been awhile since I have let myself write like this, so maybe that’s not a bad thing.
I will never stop being grateful for the people who have kept me alive. I want to say I’m lucky, but I think it’s less luck and more the fact that the people I’ve met have have such deeply, wonderfully good souls. I look at them, or I hold them, or I breathe them in and everything about them just radiates love. It took me awhile to see this, took me awhile to recognise that maybe my heart could find a home in all of them too. I guess I have learned to be less selfish with my love. Less selfish with my time. Less selfish with me. I am learning to give more, listen more, learn more.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel like my twenties will happen. I feel like I’ll be there to see my thirties (but that’s a blog post for another day many days from now). Heck, I feel like my twenties will be good. I sort of fumbled through my teenage years and spent most of them being destructive and feeling empty, but I feel like I am moving past that. I have interests now! I have hobbies and different groups of friends and I make art. I feel like I have come to a point where I am contented with where I stand in relation to my family and my passions and my friends. And maybe my mind is running on an old operating system and it’ll take a bit longer to get to where my heart is, but I think I just might get there. Maybe not this month or this year, but at some point in this lifetime. Somewhere down the road.
That’s a lot of rambling. It’s 1.00AM. Goodnight, and thank you for reading.
