It is understandable, I suppose, for a person to feel rather at odds with herself when – after 24 beautiful years at home, with a beautiful family, she finds herself suddenly with her bags packed and her car loaded down with boxes, and all the inextricable, indefinable, extraneous paraphernalia of a life that does not fit into 12 by 14 cubes of cardboard tossed haphazardly into bags of various shapes and sizes pretending order, and further finds herself traveling at 70 (or perhaps 75) miles per hour up a highway for seven hours until she reaches, finally, a city she only really knows about from fourth grade geography and a last year of intermittent exploration, a town 400 miles away if it is a mile, and then finds herself plopping herself down in a tiny, sweet, little apartment that cannot possibly be hers, but that, for the next year at least, most certainly is hers, and hears in the back of her boggled mind a voice (her own) telling herself that she has arrived home and that this girl is now who she is. So if I’m a little not myself, please forgive me. For the past three weeks, I have had the continuous, unsettling feeling that I just might have inadvertently snuck into someone else’s life and that my own still awaits me somewhere on the other side of this, whenever I come to my senses.
Let me assure you – and myself – that this blog is not to become the “Unending-Journals-of-Roya-as-she-Unpreparedly-Embarks-on-her-First-and-Startling-Journey-into-the-Real-World-and-all-that-that-Implies.” But between July 14 and now, there have been a hundred or so topics I have begun to write about and then discarded as being unqualified to appear before the public, no matter how small that public may be, or how little they may care. And now, this topic keeps waving its exuberant little arms in front of my face like a student with a question (though not a high school student, high school students being far superior to raising their hands and being, instead, absolutely certain of their propriety to discuss aloud any intelligible or unintelligible subject about which they hold an opinion, with the air in general if no one else will listen); or like a squirmy little squid, similar to the one in Finding Nemo who “inks” every time he gets anxious. And I could ignore it, like I do with many things I simultaneously want and do not want to write about. But it remains stubbornly the elephant in the room (do not excuse my long-winded, only moderately adept mixed metaphor here; it is ghastly and entirely inexcusable), and to skip over it would be like skipping over adolescence with the expectation of reaching adulthood painlessly and quickly but still with all the knowledge and experience those years acquire.
My new residence in Sacramento is:
418 miles from my home, my mom, my dad, my sister, my birds, and my cat;
413 miles from my hometown, my favorite coffee shop, my favorite bar, my favorite bean and cheese and breakfast burritos, and my favorite sandy spot; and
109 miles from the nearest glimpse of the Pacific Ocean
It is also:
4.1 miles from Jason’s front door;
17 miles from my school (go Aggies!) and all the cows, horses, and chickens who there abide;
11.6 miles from the Yolo Fruit Stand off of County Road 32B, and the Yolo Causeway, which spans the Yolo Wildlife Area, consisting of gorgeous wetlands always spotted charmingly with white herons who remind me of home; and
0 miles from my first own front door, paid for, in part, by the Federal government, and, in most, by my parents’ blood, sweat, tears, money, and love.
You can see how a girl could feel torn in a million directions.
When you are young – an adolescent – you think – or at least, I thought – that a day would come when adulthood would calmly and systematically enter my life and I’d be “grown up.” Then my full identity – who I “am” – would be reached. But as I have grown into what I can really only assume is adulthood (there unfortunately being no universal alarm to warn people of the impending event), I have come to realize that I am constantly becoming a new person – constantly renewing who I “am” based on new or amended ideas of who I “want to be.” And for me, being among the messier class of developers, this also means that I am constantly floundering about, between moments of self awareness, in states of “Who the hell am I?” and “Is this really me?” So here I am. (I think). A grown up. (I suspect). Living a new life. (Which is supposedly my own, but suspiciously unlike me). And I am almost positively, quite practically certain, that I am (at the very least) myself. (Though who myself is is quite up in the air right now.)
Luckily, I am used to being lost. I once got lost trying to find my way out of a hospital, got lost again attempting to locate my car in the parking structure outside the hospital, and then found myself in that section of Long Beach that consists entirely of one way streets, even though that particular section of Long Beach was, in relation to the hospital, in the opposite direction from my home. If the streets in Sacramento weren’t conveniently named after the alphabet and intersected by chronological numbers, I doubt I would be sitting in my living room typing this right now; I would probably be halfway to Oregon and still convinced that I was headed south. Come to think of it, if there is one thing that should make me feel at home in Sacramento, it is that the streets here were obviously named with people just like me in mind. Here is the city for lost wanderers who, on their weary ways up and down highways and across city streets, never located their destinations, but instead found a grid of avenues they could actually make sense of. And so they decided to stay
So in some ways, it’s a typical state of being for me. Maybe it’s from all the ocean flowing restlessly, relentlessly through my veins. Alas, I doubt I am so poetic as this. For me, change has always come rather gracelessly, with a resilient jolt rather than a gentle acceptance. It ain’t pretty, but I’m still mostly happy on the other side of it so I guess it’s all right. I can’t get over being gone, maybe mostly because I don’t want to get over it, because I’ll only accept this girl sitting right here on my couch if I know she is also still firmly the girl back home, only in a different light. And maybe it’s wrong to say I’m out of sorts and not myself. Maybe I am so very very much myself these days that I find it hard to recognize me.
-R.E.A.
