[editor’s note: I typed a long, lyrical thing that died horribly in battle with a Firefox browser. So, here goes another attempt.]
Note: I wrote part of this in a coffee shop, alone, so that makes it slightly less weird. But I never claimed I was normal.
I’m alone. I haven’t been alone in months. Not really alone. It’s a warm feeling, but I have to fidget to get comfortable in it. It necessitates sinking into it. I’m still fidgetting. Texting. Dastardly avoiding isolation. I haven’t been alone in months. Because even though I’ve always been really good at being alone, I know that before I know it I will be forced to be alone, and I’m so afraid of being lonely, it’s unhealthy. I’m leaving for college and I - the only child, driven and mature and content, want something to cling to. Because I’m afraid of drowning, and washing up ashore later, unidentifiable. I used to be a really good swimmer. But I’m not sure I still remember with the same ease and grace I had.
I’m having a “going away” party, for which I’m rather excited, and not sad to have. I’m excited for the physicality of travel that comes with starting one place with a red suitcase and ending at another three hours later with hundreds of people doing the exact same thing at the same approximate time in an airport. I’m excited for the college, the growing, and the pain. But I’m nervous for the departure. I’m ready for it, in a sense. But losing permanence is a threat against humanity, especially that of the modern American soul, manufactured on self-importance and merit, and ethereality is a ghost story I’m wholly afraid of (I know, mixing metaphors. But this whole thing is about lack of permanence, right? It’s a poorly done mimesis, then.) I’m no Keats or Dickinson or Auden. I’m still learning to come to terms with the temporal nature of my flesh, of my imprint.
On one hand, I’m afraid of leaving and everything except me changing. I cannot stay the same. But the idea that things will change here—the people to whom I attach my identity, and the identity of this place, the attributes that make it “home,” are not permanent either. I don’t know, beyond obvious assumptions, how I’ll change. But I cannot fathom how this place will change. I’m even more afraid of everything staying the same: the feeling of being more alienated and uncomfortable here than I’ve ever felt. (Not to say I dislike it here, but everyone has moments where they just want to leave.) Of losing friends in ways that I’ve not experienced—and finding myself, now alone, in the process.
And I realize that it is very melodramatic to think this way, and that under all likely and normal circumstances, these changes will not happen inversely, but in tandem. I am swimming off into uncharted waters, and know that what I’ll find there will be sustaining. But swimming home—surviving that journey is a concern.
I’ve haven’t experienced many changes like this in my life. I’ve lived in the same house all of my life. I’m moving towards the middle of a spectrum beginning with “BIRTH” and ending in “DEATH,” and I’ve never, obviously, dealt with anything I’m now dealing with. I’m not losing everything I have here, but I’m attempting to actually make my future in a place I think I have the best luck of, to continue the metaphor, find an island in the shape of my face with a mansion on it. (I don’t want either of those things, it’s for the sake of the metaphor.) I’m going to be alone. And I know I won’t really be alone I’ll never be alone. But it’s thoughts of this home, in the permanence it’ll stay in in my mind, that will sustain me. That will hold the lonely at bay when I make my departure.
Well I would walk five hundred miles / and I would walk five hundred more / just to be the man who’d fall down at your door…When I lonely, well I know I’m gonna’ be the man who’s lonely without you.. I’m gonna’ be the man who’s comin’ home to you. “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers
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