After Sunday it's Monday Mornings

So, here I sit, in an uncomfortable chair that doesn’t sit up quite high enough at a useless desk. Alone in an apartment that I will be packing up this week. Hard to believe it’s already been a year since I moved to this city and even harder to believe I’m already abandoning unit 6305. What a year this has proven to be. More importantly, I don’t know why I am finally sitting down to tell you, whoever you are, about it. Truth be told, I’m pissed. The chances that I am going to offend somebody before this is said and done are 100 percent. I don’t care. Nothing I will say here will be profound so don’t waste your time waiting for this motivational moment between some odd hundred number of words. Because I am not a writer and I don’t know how to make things sound beautiful and colorful. I just know how to say how I feel through Microsoft word and a blank page. Which now brings me to a stalled cursor and a lot of blinking because I am not sure where or how to start but here goes nothing.

I didn’t end up in California where the skies are always colors of the horizon and the promise of sunshine is inevitable. I didn’t enter fashion school, I don’t have my own line of clothing, and I’m not walking distance from waves crashing into the west coast shore. Turns out L.A. could chew me up and spit me out like a bad habit. Or possibly, I’m just not California material. Either way, I’m still in Arkansas, more centrally located but I’m still here. I moved to Little Rock on a whim and a bad decision. My friends were doing it, I was stuck in an in between, so I just followed the crowd. Which if that has taught me anything it is that the crowd will take off and leave you in a hot minute at first opportunity. No one cares if you got a place with them so they will not have to live with their boyfriend when they aren’t ready. People are mean, if you get something like a good job before they do and they do not think you deserve it because you aren’t as qualified as they feel they are, even your best friend will say the most unfavorable things about you. From what I understand if you have a voice and a dream you must be from shithole town with nothing to offer. Which might be right but it is where I call home with some of the best memories, some of the worst, with a few of the most down home people in the tri-state area.

A lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same. Sure this is a tale as old as time and cliché as Paris Hilton and toy dogs but hey, don’t shoot the messenger. It’s the same old story back where I call home, I don’t have to go there to know that either thanks to every Dick and Jane figuring out how to use facebook and post their life story. But my relationships with them have changed and I have changed. There really is good in goodbye, I am closer and more honest with my family, I am disconnected from all that other stupid small town he said she said. Well, sort of. In the way that I am not any longer a part of the home gossip but truth be told stupid shit like that will find you anywhere. In this one year I have been devastated, defeated, tripped down, and damn near knocked out. Before you know it, you will be hanging between on by a thread and off the edge of the main street bridge, metaphorically speaking.

Routine has almost been the death of me. I loathe it. Everything about it, everything it stands for. It keeps me tired, stressed, worried, and sick. Maybe I am just in the wrong place. I wish I could truly put into words what all of that means but it could end up being a costly mistake. What I will do is tell you that I was so eager to start living out this American dream that I made some decisions that have left with me little to no choice in certain matters now. I wanted to prove so many people wrong and I did but what they don’t and never will know is how much it has hurt me to no avail. I have to had to learn some of the hardest lessons and take some of the biggest blows all from being this little girl with a big dream. I am SO done with it. I don’t care what people think anymore, I don’t need judgment or opinions, only support and if you don’t have that, then hit the road with your two cents. This is not a cry for sympathy and if you’re wondering why I have been almost rude to a degree it’s like I said before, I’m pissed. I am not cruel yet been subjected to some of the most downright cruelty I think can be served up. What I thought would be climb to the top turned into early mornings fighting traffic jams and an elevator ride to mediocre.

With that out of my system, I am in love. Really truly deeply madly in love with someone who makes me a better person, more patient, less vengeful, not so cynical. Someone who does not deserve to take the back end of all said above but does because he also loves me. I didn’t need California or a sunset to find peace, just a willingness to open my heart up to a boy who wants to hear about the day and wants to take care of me when I feel like I can’t take care of myself. Which lately has been more often than not. Somebody I would not have met if I had not moved so there is a reason for everything.

I don’t know I’ve come here to leave you with something as mindless as this. It’s really a whole lot of nothing but some bottled feelings in a nutshell. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it more than that. That it wasn’t pretty and powerful or inspiring. But I am , right now, uninspired. I am planning on making changes sooner rather than later that will change all of that. Because things I used to love, I don’t. Things I used to care about lost meaning. Days I once lived for have become days I dread. But with a few tweaks and my boyfriend by my side, I will prevail once again. For those of you interested, I promise to keep you updated, to blog more, to be most honest..stay tuned!

This is going to be epic.

Chapter One

Something About The Sunset on Sunday

Some people fight for your life. Some people will fight for your death. It's been a while since I could find words that would flow freely out of my mind enough to stream out of my mouth or through my fingertips . Nothing that made enough sense to put on paper. Surely, I had lost my inspiration and I was beginning to feel undoubtedly certain it was taking a permanent vacation. I never considered it writer's block, I don't know that I would proclaim myself an author of any sort. It was just gone, easy as those four words are to read, it left me. Willingly, at least. I can't tell you what happened. I just know when. It had been a long time coming and in the spring of last year, the loss of everything I knew settled in. When it came crashing down on me, I was sitting in a chair draped with a soft green covering, staring off at a bronze casket topped with pure white flowers of familiar breeds. In the background light music was sounding off and the lyrics to Go Rest High on that Mountain were suddenly sinking in. I couldn't wrap my mind around death and how final it would prove to be, how defining that moment is. In minutes, two grave diggers parked off to the side waiting patiently for the services to end would be lowering my mother into the ground, dropping dirt onto those delicate roses and lillies my brother and I had so carefully chosen. I didn't have the energy to fight back tears. Take that back, I didn't even have the energy to sob anymore. I guess you might would say that's when I became lazy, easily letting go of the passion that burned inside, losing it. The insipiration to change the world with words simply vanished.

I've spent most of the past year trying to recover. I found comfort in just disappearing or sleeping days away. The problem with that is I was labeled depressed. Some people started shoving one liners in my ears. "I'm here for you", "Is there anything I can do", the list goes on. Others wanted me to see doctors to consider taking an anti depressant. Well, suck on my big toe, because I was not depressed. Clearly I have been hurt by the loss of the woman who gave me life. Not being able to hear her voice was painful, it still is. I refused to let this accident define who I was. Rather, I was bound and damn determined to find myself again. I was not ever depressed or in denial about being depressed. I was , however, in a state of shock. I was uninspired.

I am a very fortanute human being. I have been blessed with the ability to love wholeheartedly and passionately. One of, what I like to refer to, as my many talents. It is different each time and to my knowledge, it is not need based. I don't need to be loved, I don't need to anyone to love me. I want to love that way, it is only my hope that it will be returned. I don't seek and I won't ask. There is no fine line, I'll save the semantics for another chapter, on another day. The downside, however, of this beautiful curse is that I wasn't fully able to love myself. I dangerously and too quickly threw myself into a relationship that was doomed to Hell from the start. I was vulnerable and I was alone. I didn't really see what I had to lose, I was blind to what was right in front of my eyes. On that note, I was too stubborn to succumb to the truth. Because in that , knowing the truth, it would be the end. I poured out everything I had to give, which come to find out, wasn't much. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, not even close. But I was head under feet in love. Didn't that count for something? No. The handwriting had been on the wall the whole time. That was it. My time had reached the end of the rope. After all, I should have been devestated. Tears should have flooded the very room I was sitting in. I spared myself a good cry. It took a good second or three, but I was relieved. I could see the sun setting through the windows. The sky was a beautiful canvas of both pink and orange. The day was fading away, off into a tomorrow that didn't even know it existed. Yet there I sat with light shoulders and weary heart, waiting to decide on a new future. It was over, all of it. Finally, he freed me so I could move on. I've been trying every since.

As for my mom, I miss her so much sometimes that it hurts. Death has surrounded me, not only me, but the very beings I love so desperately have suffered a similar hurt as well. They also, have endured the same wrath of death I have. I won't say it seems so unfair, thats foolish. It is unfair, bottom line. It makes me angry. I don't understand the purpose of taking some life in such agony and then creating life so beautifully. I still believe in my God , though. Therefore, I won't question His motives. I'll just rest comforted by the promise that I will see each of those loved ones again. I will always be a better person because they lived. I told an elder , today in fact, that lately I have really been missing my mother. She told me there was nothing I could do about that. Those were my grandmothers words piercing through me. Just slightly over five foot tall with tired wrinkles and gray hair, she is still the most beautiful woman I will have ever known. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I would never ever even entertain the thought of crossing her. It was probably that very second, that for the first time, I saw the tears in her own eyes as she fears the inevitable coming of her own death. I can't be sure if it is actually death she is so afraid of or life for her family after the fact. But there is life, a lot of it. It will be beautiful and I can only speak for myself, I will stand courageous because she was once a part of it.

I have wasted too much time on trivial matters. It was a Sunday when I looked off into the sunset with a delighting amount of relief, regaining inspiration. More than ever, I'm ready to leave the humid summers and ridiculously cold winters of Arkansas to trade in for a different horizon in California. I will cry , with passion, when I have to leave my family. It won't be easy. If I were being honest, somedays I want throw in the towel and say this is it, just stay here and take it for what it is. But I can't and I won't. Because I am made for something so much bigger, I can love so much more than this God forsaken place will ever allow. I am special and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I love myself . That's so cool!

In a short span of 12 months I lost family, I lost my first love, I lost my inspiration, my passion. my coying desires. In the end, it worked out in my favor. I found me.

It's a crazy beautiful ridiculous mess.