Stuck Between Here and There

There is something happening to me right now.

I feel like I'm going through the motions of moving forward and hanging on again. Perhaps my move is finally sinking in, perhaps I find myself challenged in the desire to fully start living my life here. Still clinging onto the memory of a life I used to find a little to familiar. I am in a state of constant movement, of constant longing, and of constant commotion. I think all too often of all that is left behind, and I'm fascinated by all that lies within me. I have this intense yearning and desire to stop feeling so alone. To be held in the arms of the people that I love. To remember how it feels to be surrounded by people who know me for me. Yet I am in awe of the experiences and self reliance I have come to know in only a few weeks, a couple months, out here on my own.

My heart is pulled into a direction five hundred miles South and West of here. To a place where life stands still to me only in memory. Where the cars pass by an address that used to be mine. Where the sun rises and sets, just the same as when I was there. But now, it does so with one less citizen. Days pass by now in that place, unfettered by the soul that exited its gates only a few months back. Undisturbed by my fleeing. Little does it know that the person who never could call it home, only knows now how to call it just that. And the people there...The people who I don't know how to let go of. The old friends, the best friend, the newest friends who were left all too soon. It just perpetuates this need to run back. To wonder how I ever took them for granted, or ever wished for more.

To be 30, and single, and slightly edgier than the people in your new place of employment were quite ready for, in a suburb not exactly what you pictured it to be, is hard. I find myself in a constant battle with my mind. The good vs. the bad. What out weighs the other? Was this the right choice, or was it me, running, again? I struggle with the wondering, with the looming cloud over my head - will anyone here ever know me like they knew me. Will I forever be...

This lonely.

Because I sure am, lonely.

There are days that are better than others. Where strangers who only see me as threatening, ask me questions about who I am...where I think, maybe a breakthrough isn't far off. But it isn't the same. And I wonder if it ever will be.

I think about the friendships I sabotaged on my way East on I-64. My best friend. Whose laughter I hear, and whose tears I see played over and over every day in my mind. She who I loved more than anything else there. She who made it home.

I did so many things in my grand departure that I am not proud of, and my restitution has been masked by illusions of grandeur, by fleeting moments of content, marked by an ever present battle between my heart and my mind.

If there is such a thing as Karma, well, she has come knocking on my door - demanding her payment in full.

And I live in regret.

Regret for not appreciating what I had. For not truly understanding what it meant. Or for seeing the love that surrounded me. I regret not being a better person to the people I should have been better to. For causing my own heartache, and the heartache of those I cared for the most.

And somewhere inside my core, there is something that still enables me to know and believe that where I am is exactly where I am meant to be. To learn and to fall and to be just me, maybe for the first time in my life. Perhaps where I need to be is totally alone so that I may stumble, to recreate and to learn how to stand on my own accord. To be self reliant, and to rediscover. To cry. To remember. To be thankful and draw pause. To not take for granted the friendships I do have, ever again. To make changes in a company - that needs the kind of changes I can bring. To meet people who have never had the pleasure to meet someone like me. To be sad and spontaneous instead of sad and pathetic. To love from afar those who have changed me the most. Appreciating, a life that was better than I ever thought it was.

It's a strange feeling of empowerment and utter helplessness. Of wanting to say, I need you. I'm sad. I'm lonely. And I'm happy. Because, I am happy. I think that's what is the strangest contradiction. I am happy. Yet I'm so sad. I don't know how to balance these emotions or feelings. I don't know how to say things to even my closest friends because I can't describe the intensity these mixed emotions have. So I retreat, as always, inside this empty soul, inside this small apartment, inside another empty bottle.

I retreat, because I don't want you to know how bad it really is. I just want to smile and laugh and hide the tears that come too easily, no matter what their origin. I want to hide behind the good days (that do outweigh the bad) so that you can't tell that I'm having a hard time.

Anyway, I'm stuck somewhere between here and there. Between the good and the bad. The past and the present. The before and the unknown. I'm stuck. Trying to move forward before I spend too much time holding on to something that is no longer there, as I'm so prone to do.

Waiting to learn more.

Wanting just to remember.