It’s too easy to feel old.
Today I drove out to a local park. November wind burnt my cheeks, cauterizing wounds I had left open without noticing; red is only one way to bleed. I held a gate open for a woman and her child. I passed an old woman who was walking in her socks, carrying only one shoe and smiling. My shoes crushed layers of decaying golden-brown leaves, waterlogged and curled at the end like soggy cornflakes.
I realized I hadn’t eaten cornflakes since I was in elementary school, but I could still remember the taste of them and how my mother would serve them from the white box with that green rooster mascot. It was only later in my life that I learned my mother was terrified of roosters. She grew up on a farm, where one of my grandfather’s roosters attacked her from behind, dug into her shoulders with his talons and pecked at her head. It is strange to think that girl and my mother are the same. I have learned so much since I was that little girl who munched on cornflakes and didn’t know even parents could fear the world. Sometimes that girl is a stranger.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I am nineteen. Too often when I am around my peers I feel disconnected—even here, at college, where most people are newer than they’ve ever been, when we are all scrambling to discover what we need, reaching out for so many separate things with hands that don’t communicate, like split-brain patients. Even with alcohol and astrophysics textbooks in hand, we are all trying to decide which sandbox we are going to sink into after we graduate; we are all hoping that the other kids play nice.
I like to think this, anyway. I like to think that none of us really know what we’re doing because I am confident only in that I am not sure where I’m going. I love and hate this.
I am slowly teaching myself to welcome uncertainty. Stability is something I simultaneously crave and scorn, just as I am thrilled and terrified by all my uncertain possibilities. I don’t know what I want. Or, rather, I know what I want—but all those wants invariably contradict. I read about a split-brain patient who, when reading a book, would turn a page with one hand, but the other hand would turn it back. He eventually had to sit on one hand so the other one could turn the page uninterrupted.
One side of me wants to move to a city and fall in love with everything there; the other side wants to never stop running, let all the strings I’ve cut whip behind me, tattered flags of victory and surrender that won’t stop waving long enough to be replaced. But I don't want to sit on my hands. I want to know both.
I am reminded of a line from “Dive,” a poem by Andrea Gibson:
“Like right now I’m needing nothing more than for you to hug me
and if you do I’m gonna scream like a caged bird.
Life doesn’t rhyme.
Sometimes love is a vulgar word.”
Sometimes it’s easy to feel overwhelmed—by finances, relationships, degrees, homework, networking, all the conflicting tasks I must accomplish in order to have the most certain uncertain future I can bear.
But sometimes it is enough to go to a park, listen to Broken Bells on my iPod, and play on a swingset, even though my legs are too long anymore and brush the ground with every swing backward.
No comments:
Post a Comment