Lately

Lately, I feel like a transient on a stopover in my own life.  I sleep on the couch, I use my cell phone as an alarm clock, I’m driving someone else’s car, I keep my medication in my purse.  I feel like I could just pick up and sleep on any couch, anywhere; take out my phone and my cold pills, my water bottle and my book; and be at home.  It’s strange for someone so hooked on stuff, on having my own things around me, to feel this way.  It makes me feel so out of place, so ungrounded. I’ve also become that annoying person at work who takes a walk every day at lunch, comes back all rosy-cheeked and windblown and asks if you’re going to come with tomorrow.  I’ve been walking two miles with one of my coworkers every day, and it is so not me – the fat girl, the girl who always read a book sitting on the sidelines instead of joining the kickball game at recess, the girl who will always lie down when there is the chance.  But it feels good to get up and move after sitting at my desk all day – just the way when I was shoveling horse shit for a job, it felt so good to stop moving my body and lie out in the far-off fields and have a cigarette. 

The weather the past few days has been perfect walking weather – cold and crisp and dry, the residue of snow at the edges of the road all full of little twittering birds hopping around, the footprints of deer off in the woods, the wind bracing but not overwhelming.  We start moving and immediately my sinuses start to drain, I’m blowing my nose every two minutes, but my head feels clearer than it has all morning.  By the end of the walk, I feel whole again, like I have energy and I can face the phone and the keyboard with renewed patience, like I can figure out dinner tonight without crumbling into a heap of “why doesn’t he love me?  what am I doing wrong?”.  Funny how that shit they throw at you about exercise and depression and endorphins and blah blah blah  is really not so much shit, after all.

I’ve also realized that the things you dreamed about when you were young – about finding out you are adopted royalty, about being discovered by a casting agent and becoming a model/actress/etc., about being some sort of amazing prodigy – all those dreams go sort of kaput as you get older.  In the past few years, my dreams have become so mundane – me and my family, a house by a lake, a big slobbery dog, a beautiful remodeled kitchen, laughter and card games and squishy couches and piles of books, walks in the snow holding hands with my husband, birthday parties with squirt guns and laughing children…  Suddenly all I want are the things I disdained 10 years ago, when I swore I would never live in suburbia.  Oddly enough, now that my dreams are so simple, they seem so much less attainable, so much harder to grasp at, so much farther from real life.  I guess because they are things I’ll have to bring about myself, while the other things I wanted – the archduke coming to my house with the royalty letter, the casting agent with the contract ready to sign – are passive, they’re things that happen to me without any effort on my part.  Now I have to work toward the house and the lake and the dog, now I have to facilitate my own dreams.