I feel
pretty old. Not in a necessarily bad way, but I feel pretty old. It's weird, it's as if I'm
realizing for the first time all over again that I am in control of my life, and I can do
whatever I damn well please, but at the same time I still feel like I'm in that
emotional limbo of being 15... yet not. Things are more
opaque now, like old fishes eyes in markets in Chinatown. Things are easier to handle with less emotional
strife. I used to have so much emotional strife in my
existence, there was always
something wrong, and now... there's not.
It's very easy for me to say that it's a breath of
fresh air. My previous relationship was
rife with strife, it ran my life (so
Suess!) and John is as easy as pie. He smiles a lot, he
kisses me and makes me smile, we don't fight, we don't hurt each other, we buy each other dinner and give each other back rubs. We're happy and good and damn, we're comfortable with each other. We even fart on each other and laugh about it.
For the first time in my life, i'm not worried about it. I'm not
worried about where this relationship is going. I'm not worried that I'm going to be
fired from my job. I'm not concerned with what people think anymore. I'm not
afraid of failure anymore. There is a line from a
Salman Rushdie book sung by an
ayah -nanny? (poorly paraphrased) that goes, "you can be anything you want to be, anything you all want to be, you can be." This is how I define my current existence.
Someone was telling me I ought to be a
shrink. Instead of an immediate guffaw, there was a calm,
easy sinking feeling of
reality telling me that if I worked hard, I could if I wanted to. It would be, in
classic midwestern prose, no big thing. I'm really, finally, doing okay in every area of my life. I've taken
responsibility for all the stuff I've done, I've been responsible about
being to work on time and keeping my diet pretty regular, not drinking beer all the time, and remembering to laugh and let loose and have fun being
young and in love. To put it
lightly, right now I have it made. Sans emotional strife.
I know so many people who have so much going for them, who
absolutely abhor life, and can't seem to stand the idea of
appreciating a day out of context. That, however, is
a subject in and of itself.