I feel very much like I'm floating. I'm evidently still afflicted with mono, despite my doctor's recommendation that I go back to work, because I'm still tired all the time and still fighting off random aches and pains. I'm bored and I have nothing to do and no one to hang out with. Rather, I have PLENTY to do, and the desire to get off my ass and move around, but not enough energy to do it.
This is just so incredibly unfair. How many zillions of people in the world are voluntarily sitting on their asses right now, complaining that there's nothing to do, while I'm sitting on my ass knowing full-well there's PLENTY to do: dishes to be done, a post office to walk to, friends to visit, letters to write, walks to take, JOBS to get... My gahd, I'm not asking for much.
I really felt better for a little while... When Brian was here, I can only imagine that he thought I'd made up the whole mono thing. The one and only time I felt ill that whole week was when I was trying to keep up with him while climbing a rather steep hill on the nature preserve behind Binghamton University campus. It was a hot day; anybody would have gotten a little tired.
Now, all of a sudden, I'm sick again. I'm wondering if this will ever end. Today will mark five weeks of this awful, nudging pain in my side; it began precisely as my friend Aaron was saying to me, "If you start to get a pain in your left side, go to the doctor, because it's probably mono." Five weeks. Am I NEVER going to get better? Will I spend the rest of my life dreading the length of the walk to the video store three quarters of a mile away? Am I going to actually finish all these books I haven't read and resort to reading Leonard Maltin's film reviews? Will I spend the rest of my life in this apartment watching TV and writing letters?
[Let me tell you, this is a good time to be my penpal...]
Now, there are two ways to look at this...
I have just about nothing holding me down now. Several of my casual friends have disappeared during my illness; I told off one of them because she kept calling and hounding me all the time to entertain her. So, that's a few people I don't need to think about anymore. I lost my job, and have no immediate prospects for a new one. Norman and I... well... I sense this distance creeping between us... Most of that, I think, is my doing, but whatever the cause, I really don't think we love each other all that much anymore. He's cold and distracted, I'm sad and distracted. My mom graduated and got a job, my brother graduated and got two jobs. I haven't got much left after this whole ordeal.
Now, when I went to college, I felt similarly. My family withdrew from me, my friends -- honestly, almost all of my close friends -- moved away and began to lose touch with me. My coffeehouse closed. My lover ignored me. I was stranded in a desert with nothing holding onto me, no trace of the familiar, no evidence that I'd ever had a LIFE before moving to New Mexico.
I did the wrong thing. I went back home to try to reclaim the last fragments of my life. I came back home to try to put my family back together, and that failed miserably. I tried to find all my friends, and found out that most of them had moved on with their lives and had no intention of looking back to see how I was. I waited impatiently for my coffeehouse to reopen, and in the meantime made friends with a bunch of pothead losers who couldn't have cared less about anything except where their next five bucks was coming from. I spent two years slowly putting together this life, trying to gain some semblance of security: friends, an apartment, a significant other, housemates, HOME.
["...I want a place I can call my own..."]
Now, I want to do the right thing. I DON'T want to wait another week for this stupid mono to leave me alone, and then go out and get another food-service/retail/gas-station job, make six bucks an hour, and quietly live with my boring little security.
Fucking NOTHING is ever secure. There is NO SUCH THING as home. There is ALMOST no such thing as real friendship; you move on and in two years, they don't matter anymore to you, and you don't matter anymore to them. There is no such thing as a long-term job that will always make me happy, no such thing as a coffeehouse that will never close. There is no such thing as ALWAYS feeling happy and healthy. There is NO SUCH THING AS SECURITY.
So I don't want to pretend anymore. I don't want to desperately grasp at material things, furniture, addresses of friends, a weekly paycheck, and that wonderfully comforting ability to walk to the same coffeehouse everyday... Things change. Things don't last. People leave. People stop loving you. Bars burn to the ground. Websites crash. Notebooks get dropped into the bathtub and become illegible. Business owners get tired of catering to you. Everything fades. And so I want not to rely on all of these things; I want to have my OWN life, and my OWN soul, and I don't want to die or fade away when I lose these friends and jobs and familiar places.
In Santa Fe, I let it beat me. I let myself believe that a house, a family, money, and friends would keep me happy, and I lost all of it, and didn't think I wanted to be alive at all. I remember long drives in the desert with Mike, pondering these things, looking out on lonely rocks and sand, listening to R.E.M., watching a foreign-looking moon rise, and I remember distinctly understanding three options. One, I could kill myself. Two, I could rush home to pick up all the pieces of what I thought was ME. Or three... I could move on, find new friends, get a job, find someplace new to have my coffee, fall madly in love with who I was, where I was, and when I was. Expect to change. Expect everything else to change. Stop relying on everything around me. Just live, and live passionately.
I CHOSE THE WRONG ONE.
I will NOT make that mistake this time.
I'm floating right now, sort of weightless. No burdens, no pressures, few attachments, few connections, no deadlines, no wages, no "regulars."
I want to leave town. I want to go back to school. Not to get a paper and get a good job, but to learn, to maybe find a little bit of enlightenment, to have something IN ME to rely on. I want to meet a hundred thousand new people, and see a million new places. Not so I can brag about my experiences, but so that I can recall LIVING when I need to. I want to be rid of all the rest of the things holding me here. I want to sell this gahd-awful TV, push my furniture off on some relative, gather up a few pictures, a video or two, and ten or twenty books, and just go. Let go of this disgusting tendency to settle down, settle in, find some peace and die. I want to be speeding through the desert again, just one more time, to BE there in absolute desolation, no comfortable destination, no happy home behind me, in absolute freedom, in flight, in orbit.
To HELL with the Binghamton Curse. To HELL with the idea that once you leave, you'll come back searching for your roots. I HAVE no roots, and I don't WANT any. I want to get over this mono, and I want to move on.
["...Sabina knew she would leave, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home, the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable..." --"The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Milan Kundera.]
I am making the right choice this time.
I need some help, and I'm addressing this to every one of you who is reading this.
I want to go to school, and I want to do so out-of-state. I want to study English with a concentration in writing, or major in Creative Writing. I think I want to move to the West Coast. Someplace with hills and water.
I'm 21 years old, and I have absolutely no financial means of putting myself through school right now. Asking my parents for money is out of the question, because my mom doesn't have it and my dad has already refused.
I don't really know how to find schools that are cheap and that cater to my interests. This was a much easier task when I was in high school and thousands of colleges sent me brochures, and guidance counselors did all the work for me. I certainly don't know how to get student aid or loans.
So. If ANYBODY reading this has ANY ideas about some good colleges, if anybody knows of ways to apply for student aid, if anybody knows of ways to get the government or somebody to help me out with money, PLEASE let me know.
I deserve this.
I NEED this.
I just don't know how. So if you've got any ideas, email me at belong@angelfire.com, and I absolutely mean it. Don't hold back anything. Yesterday, I had more than 50 people visit this site, and I expect 50 emails in my inbox tomorrow full of advice or even "I don't have any idea what to tell you, but good luck." Email this journal entry to people you know who might be able to help, and insist that THEY email me.
I don't know who most of you are anymore; most of you are just lurkers and I don't get much feedback. But I know you're there, I know you're keeping up with my life, and I know that a good number of you are genuinely interested. You don't acknowledge it, and I don't usually acknowledge you, but your presence is known and it is appreciated. And now, your advice will be appreciated. I love you all, and thank you.
Love,
~Helena*
"What then shall we choose? Weight, or lightness?"