I thought I learned my lesson a year ago. I thought I was done expecting things from people who never promised me anything. I thought I already learned that life lesson – had it down pat. I guess not – for now I’ve had an unwanted refresher course: teaching me things I thought I already knew, and just as painfully as the first time. Do I understand now? Do I get it? Will this life lesson stay with me, or will I go on learning it time and time again throughout my life?
I flick on my blinker and suddenly realize that I’ve almost driven all the way home without noticing. Twenty miles flew by under the wheels of my SUV as I sat, thinking about other things. Four Corners by Josiah Leming starts to play on my ipod, and I think about how that song always tends to play when I’m almost home.
Josiah sings out of the speakers of my car, and I sing along with him.
“Must have passed at least a million homes,
Can’t but help and wonder which one’s mine”
I got two hours of sleep last night. No, this morning. I went to bed at 5:55am, got up at 8 to finish that paper I had stayed up all night working on. I feel so tired – so tired that I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep. Not the giddy tired, either. Just tired. Bone tired.
“Half of the moon is all that we get this time.”
I drive down my road, towards home. It’s the middle of december, almost Christmas, really, and there’s no snow. No snow in Michigan in December. I wonder if we’ll ever have a white Christmas again. That’s all snow’s good for, anyway.
“Blink twice, it’s never real.”
I keep thinking about you. I want to hang out with you again. I think about how I’ve seen you more than I’ve seen any of my other friends in the past two weeks. I wonder if that means anything. Maybe I just like you because I like things when they’re new, when I haven’t gotten tired of them yet.
“I wish that my heart could eat away my brain,
‘Cause it swings in front of me and makes me insane.”
When I get home I curl up in a ball on the newish purple rug in my room. It’s comfy. Slowly I come to realize that I’m laying on the floor in my bedroom. I don’t care, though. Sometimes being a girl is painful. Sometimes being alive is painful.
“Four corners make a whole,
And the holes will drag you under.”
Did you ask her, too? Did you go up to random people on the street and ask them to save you? Did she say no? Did they shake their heads or hand you small bills, hoping either way that you’d leave them be?
I can’t picture what the view must be like from inside your head. Usually I’m good at doing that. It all just looks blurry and gray from over here. Maybe that’s what you’re seeing.
I don’t know what to think anymore. Maybe we all just need a break. All of us. If we all agree to wait a day, to skip one 24-hour section, and just sleep, or do something nice, would that fix it? Call it a cease-fire of life.
What do you think? That’s all I really want to ask you. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it? No, I don’t really think that. I don’t even agree with you. I just shake my head and wish you’d leave me be.
We’re all just floating on by, down the river. There’s a waterfall at the end, just like in all the dramatic movies you’ve ever seen with a river in them. We’re all going to fall, one day. Maybe more than once. Maybe at the end it will feel like falling.
I wish somebody would save me. I’m really not all that brave or sure of anything. I act like it, though. I’m afraid to be afraid. I won’t be. I’d rather be able to do it on my own. That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since you left me; even before I met you. It’s a process, it’s a journey down this river.
I want to save you, I do. But I don’t even know what that means. And I don’t know you. And I don’t know if you want to be saved. Doesn’t everyone? That waterfall is coming but we’d all rather be with other people when the boat goes down. No one really wants to be alone.
Hey Infinity 