same blog new purpose

Or maybe it's the same purpose, just rambling reflections on my life to get some of this babble out of my head and onto paper so as to hopefully quiet my mind.

What I want to write about now is this new realization I have come to recently about some of these strange, contradictory, painful, intense, mostly undefined feelings swirling about inside of me and threatening to overwhelm me at any time. The thing is, I am lonely. I am not lonely because I moved across the country on my own and live with a stranger that I don't particularly like. I am lonely because I know that now as an adult i.e. graduated from college and no longer following a semi-structrued path I am the only one accountable for my decisions. That the big scary, complicated, even small, simple yet scary in their newness are all up to me to decide. Even if all my friends from home were here living minutes from me they could do nothing for me. Oh sure they could be my bitch buddies about all of it, like finding a dentist and taking my car for an oil change and grocery shopping and getting locked out of my apartment. If my friends were here I would go curl up next to them on the couch, tell them about my day and whine about these adult things and we would have a laugh at the childishness of it and that would be very nice. I would feel better for a short while but ultimately  I would have to deal with these things. That is why I am lonely. It is a bone deep loneliness of shouldering the burden of life on my own just as everyone else does.

Of course I am lonely in the expected ways too. Of not having people near me who inherently understand everything about me. Or I guess that isn't really true because I have come to a point where some of my friend co-workers seem to truly get me like my friends back home. But they aren't single and living with me. They belong to their husbands and/or kids, they don't belong to me like my friends did in college. I desperately desire that feeling of connection again but have this sense that that time is over at least for a while. I am in a transition period and won't have that kind of thing again until I have settled some of my major issues first. Or maybe that is just my linear thinking reeking havoc on my ability to enjoy this moment and see the possibilities of the future not logical steps I should be taking.

In this phase of life I am always saying goodbyes. EL moving has just epitomized this heart breaking trend to me. I feel I will always be in a state of minor heartache where I am missing people. I need to embrace this, to accept it, lean into it because it is a fact of being an adult. There is no college dorm full of easy to maintain friendships with people down the hall running over to watch the Office in their PJs. What's left in the place is this dull ache as this truth slowly sinks in day by day. I am here and they are there. Our paths will cross at times in the years to come and after those moments I will feel the aching even stronger for a short time. But it will fade until our next encounter when I realize how much I'd dulled the feeling of missing you. When I am heartbreakingly overjoyed to see you that I am speechless railing against myself to speak, to make this moment be full of hilarity and joy to remind you why you love me. To make all this missing feel worth it. I am worth missing dammit! But instead I just stare at you boring my eyes into yours desperately trying to telepathically make you understand. To see into my head the jumbled mess of longing reaching out to you. Don't leave me. But you do leave, or more accurately I leave as I am the one who lives far away now. And I feel something like regret for the things I could not say. Maybe I didn't need to say them, maybe you understand me so well you know what I wish I was saying. And what would I say anyway? It's not really even that, some performed speech revealing some hidden side of myself. It is just reiterations of all the things you already know but I feel the need to say over and over every time I see you to reassure myself that you know and will not forget me. So I smile and stifle the tears if I can and say I am fine and we will talk soon and I get on my plane and cry until my throat aches like a golfball has swollen to a grapefruit in the back of my throat and my nose is so clogged I cannot breath. I cry for missing you. I cry for needing you, for being weak and not as brave as you think I am. I cry for how confused I am. How so many people and places can feel so right and so wrong all at once. I cry because I don't know where I belong, feel I've never really belonged, feel I may never belong, may never allow myself to belong. I cry because I am supposed to. I cry because I don't feel like I'm doing it right, that I don't know what I am doing. That I am not living. That I am holding myself back. Waiting for something but no idea what that is. I cry because I am lonely.