my birthday is coming up. it is in the last few weeks before I have a birthday that I usually try to take a step back and evaluate my life.
It struck me last night that I am exactly the sort of person I would have idolized in 9th grade. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be all uppity. I go to an art school, I listen to "cool" music. I'm independent, I don't have a boyfriend. I have a few close pals. I have better clothes than I did when I was 14. I am what I wanted to be. Its funny though, because it doesn't feel like I thought it would. I feel like a normal person. I am happy. I'm not as lonely as I used to be in middle/high school. Which is funny--because it was lonesome then--even though I didn't realize it. It's a different kind of lonely. The type you can't quite put a finger on, and yet, you can. It's this emptiness in the corners of your mind--the place you go looking for when you aren't clouding your mind with other interesting and bothersome thoughts. It would be easier to find again if it were like a ball of yarn or spool of thread I found in my closet. I didn't know it was missing, but when I found some of the tangled thread around a pair of boots, I was able to trace the path of thread back to its source. It hadn't really gotten away after all. But the lost object seems to have packed up and moved away. Now there's just a mark made of the dust that used to gather around the object on the hardwood flooring, not a trace of color or thread.