Suddenly/Finally/Okay

Thursday, July 2, 2009

7:19 pm

Somewhere on I-57, headed to St. Louis

I’m listening to music, reading Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live and occasionally getting distracted by the striking view out my window. I’m just in stupid Southern Illinois, a part of the country I’ve never given much thought, despite driving through it countless times. In my mind, anything in Illinois that’s more than ten minutes south of my house is nothing but cornfields and farms or new housing developments selling residences twice as large as they need to be. But right now, two miles north of I-74, I keep looking out my window at a mostly-overcast sky and dark green fields of corn stalks about three feet tall, utterly blown away by the sun creeping through the clouds. It makes it look like God or something like him/her is going to descend at any moment (possibly on something resembling a UFO) through the streaming light, sun rays shooting to the ground creating a cone of light beams from a central point where I presume the sun is, though I can’t see it .

At the moment when I re-noticed this incredible effect of nature (having pointed it out to my parents earlier), Finale B was on my iPod (on my shuffled playlist of the 350 songs to which I actually know the lyrics), and for an instant, something clicked. “There’s only us, there’s only this/Forget regret or life is yours to miss” the company sings, lyrics I know so well but usually hear in a theatre, or my room, or on a subway train, preoccupied by a homeless person or trying to figure out what the cute guy across from me is reading and if that girl next to him is his girlfriend. None of that today. Sorry, Chuck, as humorous as you are, this time the lyrics, combined with this fantastical sun-cloud opus, strike a chord in me. I realize (and this sounds ridiculous, at least to me) that I am… happy.

Now this feels like a rather innocuous/benign/mundane/so what kind of statement. But for me, actually being consistently happy on a day to day/ (mostly) moment-to-moment basis is not a state I can really remember since before junior high, at least. For the last month or so, though, generally speaking, I’ve been happy almost all the time. I’ve been reading good books, spending time thinking without feeling guilty for not working on a homework assignment, and enjoying the frequent company of my UU friends, which is no small feat as they span the distance between St. Louis and Milwaukee.

Having Nic especially in my life has been a really wonderful blessing. This year, on June 7^th, the 2 year anniversary of the day Jack cut himself out of my life and effectively created a myriad of issues for my psychological well-being for the next two years, I wasn’t thinking about him. I went to church with my mom and Nic, and was just really happy to spend the day with people I love. I’m certainly not over my trust issues entirely, and I may never be. Yet with time and lots of help, things are definitely getting better.

It’s funny, my friends all told me I would “take New York by storm” (which makes very little literal or even figurative sense), and I would find some great guy there and life would be perfect. Don’t get me wrong; I never for a second regretted coming to NYU and NYC, I can’t imagine being anywhere else. Yet it wasn’t until I came home for the summer that I finally found an amazing guy. So while I love every minute of my NYC life, I still have to remember – my mom would probably faint if she heard me say this – New York isn’t everything. Now attachment I haven’t spent every minute of high school planning and figuring out every minute detail of makes me nervous. I’m okay with being attached to NYU, because by sophomore year I’d figured out everything I needed to do to get into NYU and I spent the rest of my time in high school doing just that. I didn’t plan for this relationship with Nic at all, so I don’t know how to maneuver it or what to expect. That is, like most of the best things in life, both incredibly exciting and extremely terrifying.

But, you know, I think life always needs a little bit of both.

The sun looks a lot prettier streaking through the clouds.

(As an addendum added today, July 3, let me just say that it's also pretty great that I know Colleen, because even though she's basically as confused as I am, we're sort of the same kind of confused, and at least she makes sense to me.) The end.