I'm standing on the beach. My feet are evenly spreading their weight on the sand waiting for the next wave to crash and push the water a few centimeters over my ankles. I look up and the ocean purges a wave out of it that sprints towards me. The five inches of murky salt water rush over the tops of my feet and the expanse of water flows like an opened Brooklyn fire hydrant on the hottest day of summer.
The water keeps rushing forward and embracing all life around it until there's a brief pause, a halt, a deep breath, and the frightened water returns to the one that birthed it. As it tries to pull me down, it also buries my feet with sand. I'm sinking. The water disappears as fast as it arrived except now my feet are gone.
Then all I want is the water to come back, to feel the rush of the water of the world coming at me.
I've found out that this is probably why I haven't written in almost a month. I've started to create a divide between my old life and my new life. There's an obvious separation between my life in California and the one I now inhabit in New York that doesn't need to be explained in the spatial void or cloud or ether that is the internet.
My mum came to visit me this past week and she was promptly informed by all of my friends that I had been speaking of her for a week before she arrived. Everyone knew she was coming. I was excited to be able to show her, display to her, this new life that I'm living. We wandered my neighborhood, the financial district and new WTC, I took her to the Brooklyn flea market for the artisanal inventions and convections next to a view of the Manhattan skyline, we spent an entire evening drinking, eating, and visiting with friends at my "local hangout", and her favorite night was the one where we ingested everything savory and sweet at the restaurant I work at where all of my fellow employees declared her "fuckin' awesome." The whole experience was, in a way, me proclaiming that I have separated myself from everything California. People ask me all the time whether I'm going to go back there and my response always sways between "Probably at some point" and "Not unless I can't help it."
That must be why I have such reservations about certain people visiting me while I'm here. I didn't realize it until my mum and I were sitting on the Brooklyn waterfront and I was starting to get upset and yell that I didn't want Kyle to come visit me in New York. I didn't want him to come here and I didn't want to have him stay with me and I didn't want to see him, goddamnit. All this after speaking of him and holding him on the same level as my own family. After mentioning that I love him because I grew up with him in my most formative years so I had no choice.
But I don't want the life I ran away from to come back to me. The exact thing I was fleeing, the exact thing that made me hate the nonexistent life that I had would be right back in my life. It'd force its way into a place, mentally and physically, that is sacred now. Maybe I was recognizing the disgust I had with where my life had been. Maybe I was scared of the emotions, the hate, the anger, the complete sadness, that surrounded that part of my life. Maybe all I've done is force those feelings away because there really was nothing fundamentally wrong with my life then...it was just a cage with a rusty lock that I finally picked through. I was yelling at my mum that I didn't want my past life to be let into the one I have now. I just wanted it gone. I wanted it intangible.
So this brings me to where I am now. I've mentioned this occurrence of yelling at my mum and I've also previously (in another post) mentioned how I've created a divide between my summer travel lives and my "normal" lives.
Beau moves to New York next week. That fiery, honey-dipped, funk rock, Alabama host of mine from my road trip. It's a great wonder of life this couchsurfing experience I've had over the past three years. One of my best friends is someone who "surfed" my couch in Lafayette. I've had a live fish thrown in my freezer, danced salsa on a roof in a rainstorm, seen a timeline of love in photo form, followed a tornado, ridden a motorcycle through the streets of Barcelona at midnight, all while couchsurfing. Some of the most significant experiences of my life have happened while I've been couchsurfing. Probably most of them. Birmingham was one of them. We all know that I didn't mean to end up in New York. I didn't mean to and was probably trying to avoid the effort of it all until I was having an argument about it with Beau on his porch and he intellectually cornered me - or, rather, saw me bullshitting my way through the talk - and asked, "You do know that you can do everything you want - everything you've mentioned just now - in New York, right?"
Right. And after my dumbfounded pause and stutter, I thought: There's no point in arguing anymore. Might as well go for it all, no?
I didn't make it a point to decide I wanted to live in New York until my phone buzzed after arriving in Asheville, NC, with an invitation to live with Eleni in Brooklyn. At that point it seemed idiotic to not come here where I really do have every option available to me.
So...now it's happening again. Two separate lives are about to get thrown together. I don't have a choice with this one either. I don't have the option of, while yelling at my mum, realize I'm taking out my emotions towards someone else on her and deciding that I'll just tell the other person to not come to New York. This is separate. I guess I have mixed feelings about it but mostly it reminds me of how easy it is to have this mix, this convergence of lives. I like them separate. I like having a little box of parts of my life that I can keep hidden and away from the brains of everyone else in my life. Not only is my "travel life" about to crash into my "real life" but it's also a part of my "previous life" (all these stupid lives!) that's about to become the present.
Now, I feel like I'm rambling.
Kaitlin, get ready for a big mix up.
