9.09.2012

put up your hands

I quit therapy and writing. My life kept moving past the point that I wanted things to change.

Things changed when I lost my best friend. She wasn't even that, she was a placeholder, a notion that I could hold onto, a bookmark on the moment in my life that I one day hoped to come back to. I trusted in a complete stranger, and she trusted me back. We might have gone on to become great friends, but I told myself that I could pause my life, retreat into my own world, and when I was ready it would be there again.

It has been three years since I hit pause. I keep waiting to resume that life that I had, I keep trying to recreate it. Was I honestly happier in that moment? Maybe there is some irretrievable naivete that made my life seem more perfect, when I didn't know for a fact that my mind was flawed and that I would have to try so much harder for the rest of my life.

Life keeps moving within that "pause". I thought I had lost a father, running out of taxi cabs at night and doing my best to not hear my name being called as I rushed to the front door. Instead my mom was running out of my house in the middle of the night, meeting him at the cemetery like teenage lovers, crying about the end of the world in Shakespearean dramatic fashion.

I left my home recently, I packed a bag full of every book I couldn't part and grabbed all the cash I had, I showed up to a friend's house and stayed in a dark corner in the basement where little insects bit me over and over again, leaving little polka dot scars all over my skin. My habit of being inconsistent with medication led to a thunderous pounding in my head and I was screaming all over Seattle.

In its own way, this year has been nothing but moving in violent, anti-climatic circles, a never-ending exercise in emotional tumult and disappointing endings.

I will be moving into my own apartment in October. I may never be able to un-pause my life and resume it at the exact point that I left off, but I am no longer willing to wait for the perfect moment to accept the reality of my life the way it is.