I feel I've been gypped somehow (by the way, is 'gypped' a racist slur toward Gypsies?). I should be more exciting and fabulous than I am on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I'm still pretty fabulous, but I think when I envisioned my 30-something life, it involved fame, a butler, and a car not made out of recycled bottles. Also, I pictured a better wardrobe, although part of that is my laziness and apathy toward being in shape. I want to be in shape, I just don't want to actually do anything to meet that goal.
Someone told me recently that if I worked out a lot, I wouldn't be sick all the time. That may be, I don't know, I don't see how working out would cure my allergies, but that's also like saying if I ate only salad with oil and vinegar every day, I'd lose weight. Yes, that's true, but I would also be working out and only eating salad. When people say things like that to me, I hear my dad's voice, chiming in with my inner one, saying, "Why the hell would I want to do that?"
I don't know, I feel as though growing up, I was promised some sort of exciting life if I did the things one does to get to adulthood....like there's a secret maturity prize no one can tell you about, (I speculated it would be a monkey or a pirate vacation) everyone gets it once they settle down, get married, etc...Let me clarify, this has nothing to do with any level of unhappiness in my marriage, but just in general, real life is pretty boring...dishes, what's-for-dinner, did-you-get-gas, it just goes on and on until one of you dies..or kills the other one..or until you have kids and then it's a different set of monotonous, mundane issues...
Maybe I wasn't inherently promised anything; maybe I misread the signs. Possibly due to an overblown extroversion and sense of entitlement as the youngest child, I expected impossible things. I thought by now, I'd be a well-known author, or a beloved, bad-ass English professor, or in a lesser plausible scenario, the wildly red-haired lead singer of an upstart indie band, sweeping college towns with a wardrobe of gauzy peasant shirts and a following of well-read, intelligent fans.
Alas, I answer phones for a living, the last thing I had published beyond this blog was probably in 2005, I watch episodes of "Monk" every night to lull me to sleep, if there are 30 credits required for a master's in English, I lack 28 of them, and I not only own, but wear a Snuggie when I am cold. Fifteen-year-old me would beat 33-year-old me to a bloody pulp.
Can you miss a life you haven't lived? Is there a version of you, living another existence, wishing for the life you have? When it rains and that feeling to which you cannot put a name emerges, is that a life not lived, is it regret or a dream that disappeared before consciousness? Or is it something else?
I woke up, drenched, in the middle of the night, and I forgot where I was. The smells were familiar, but a fear gripped and paralyzed me until I heard your breathing ebb and flow and coax me back to sleep. I once was lulled back to sleep with mechanics and traffic and the sounds of street yelling bouncing off the tops of cars and settling into the night, along with me.
No one can raise a family in the city, but they do, I swear, I've seen the curt, assured visages of those who grew up in the city, but they're scared, too.
We all are.
You can't change anyone; change is inevitable; fear change, but don't fear fear for fear's sake.
What the hell are people talking about anymore? I don't know. I can't think with all this noise and uncertainty. Let's go to sleep.
-- me, 2011
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