4 Years in the Making.

So this is what the end of four years looks like. The trees that line the wall blocking us from the condos are larger now in a few more years they wont be able to see this patio at all someone new will live here and they wont know we ever existed.

When I graduated college my moms friend, the one who saves any stray animal she encounters, couldn’t stress enough how bad she wanted me to continue writing and, most importantly, continue my education. I understand her worry, but know, I have learned a lot in this strange bumbling life that seems to have been completely out of my control the entire time, yet entirely planned.

I wish I could go back to my old iPod, the one with my music from college, the one before I became so self-conscious, before I began compartmentalizing every aspect, every facet of my being. I’d listen to anything then, now I listen to no one just follow the slow conservative path moving forward highlighted by the most recent pop song I’ve paid a dollar for.

The kiddie pool we bought at Target the summer we discovered we had air-conditioning lays in a dump somewhere, the plastic may never decompose, but that’s not our responsibility, not ours to fix.

I remember the day I first felt rejection. How I cried on the phone when I called you and tried to keep my voice straight when I called my mom. I didn’t get into graduate school and I didn’t have a plan for failure. Instead I let that be the reason my writing ceased, because I needed that motivation because I couldn’t motivate myself. I’ve been confused ever since.

I look at the items we’ve accumulated over the years, things that are supposed to say something about us and I see nothing but misguided pressures. As I scan a stack of books on the shelf I remember the feeling of first reading T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock out loud and how the professor stressed an understanding that in our early 20’s we could never get, how fleeting this all is, how fast things change and how without even paying attention life passes. The professor is no longer alive and at his wake, feeling a big lump in my throat, I knew I was lucky to encounter someone who understood the power of passion and how we all should strive for that in our lives.

My best friend and I were doing it up big in West Hollywood, looking hot and feeling especially free. We met two nerdy guys poolside at The Standard and this was before the whole hipster thing, before greasy hair was acceptable on guys, we must have been 21. We went to their apartment near UCLA and had a couple vodka tonics. Then they brought out Trivial Pursuit and we started playing and I didn’t get one question right, I was totally humiliated and thought to myself, how am I the dumb girl? Even my friend got a couple easy questions landing herself out of the realm of the airhead-club-girl. I immediately began talking on the only subjects I knew I could redeem myself with, music and books. Turns out one of the guys really liked Junot Diaz and emo-rock and I left feeling I was perceived as less ignorant at least in the mind of one of them. I wonder if they’re architects now liked they planned and if they still look up to Philippe Starck the way I looked up to Mary Karr.

So this is what the end of four years looks like. The garden on the patio never came to be and that might be for the best because we might not want to leave it behind, all that work, all that possibility. When I clean up the pile of magazines by my bed I discover my interests have always been narrow. Music, writing, traveling. The pile of magazines is too heavy for a garbage bag so I dump them in the kitchen garbage can and hope you will take it out. Guess this is a good time to start doing things on my own like taking out the trash.

We’ve seen things come and go in this neighborhood, a nail salon opened and closed, the cheese-steak place had a grand-opening with no cheese-steaks and that fancy sandwich place that was so highly anticipated on Yelp is nothing more than a shell, a failed attempt at profitability. We saw pedestrians get hit crossing The Alameda and despite the high home costs in the area, my tires were cut and I’d wake up regularly to the sound of tweekers fighting and homeless people looking for respite in our nondescript parking lot.

I don’t mean to be sentimental. But that is the thing about writing, retrospective introspection. If today is as productive as I would like it to be I will make a playlist to go along with this writing and I will do one more load of laundry and fold it too. At 27 years old I feel much closer to knowing what to say.

4 Years in the Making

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[norma]

To thy self be true...