thank you spring break

Last night I downloaded a Distillers album and went back to the days when I was sixteen and dated a guy with a ratty truck and tattoos and hung out at the skate park with my best friend and our guy friends as they skateboarded around and we talked shit. I never thought I would ever look back to the days I wanted to get away from by going to college and actually think it would feel nice to go back, but frankly, I can't deny the fact that this new guilty pleasure of mine is putting me right back there in the park of St. Joseph. That was the only thing to do there.

I miss it. I don't miss my friend calling me crying because her drunk mom beat her in her face. I don't miss all of my friends having their divorced parent issues. I really don't miss all of my friend's drama, as the most exciting thing at the time was her certain she was going to beat the shit out of some "bitch who fucked with her ex-man." But then, maybe I do. I mean, I miss all the shit talking and the false sense of strength and all the crazy makeup I would wear. I miss going over there in the afternoon and sleeping over and then staying over the rest of the weekend because I was so tired of all of the peace at home. Isn't that such a strange thing? To hate the peace? Because the peace wasn't real. My family was different, we were always different. But ultimately, there was no more peace there than anywhere else. It's going to take the rest of my life to get understanding out of it.

The last time I talked to one of my guy friends who we would go hang out at the skate park with he told me he worked in the pork plant sorting through the just slaughtered pigs. He told me I would probably hate that, and that he is glad I went to college, because I may end up doing something like that. All of my friends were happy, if not a little bit jealous, that I didn't fail out of school like the rest of them. But it's funny, in so many ways, I am kind of envious of them. I am envious that their existence now won't be defined by attempting to become a part of society the way I have and that they now aren't in 50,000 dollars worth of college debt.

Those years of my life I literally wiped from my memory until the past few weeks. In fact, I have been having these massive flashbacks of times that I can't believe I forgot. I have been living without these memories and am wondering, "well duh, no wonder I couldn't write. I have been trying to be someone else all along." It's true. So now, my only way of grasping a hold of what I spent my time in Columbia trying to extinguish, is the music that defined these conflicted teenage years. I felt them differently than everyone else, but isn't that always the case? Somehow, I know I will find a common ground with these people I wanted nothing to do with after I left. I understand now why they developed resentment towards me. Yeah, I wanted a better life, but did I get it? I mean, who is to say? In the end I am no better than sitting in the grass at a rural town's park with my cigarette smoking friends watching long-haired skateboarders roll by.

Anyway, this is a result of my vivid dreams and flashbacks of my entire childhood I tried to get away from. I'm not sure what to do now. I'm afraid of what I may remember. How could one's recent past be such a mystery? Why was it so traumatizing for me? Why was it that what I saw anger me so much that I wanted to leave immediately, as soon as I got the chance, while the ones who were suffering so much more overtly stay? These things confuse me. I know I have just embarked on a different phase of my life.

Like I have said recently, I have no idea what I have been doing for the past five years... Moving to Columbia and starting to do drugs was a mind eraser and I had no idea how much so. Now that I am waking up from the fog I feel like I have been asleep, in some other existence. Obviously, things were recovered during it: my repressed art, my poetry. Some things never left: my romance, my stubborn sense of identity. But there was something else there, the ability to make these life altering mistakes that I would not have done before or after. But now that I am regaining composure I am certain that I will have so much more to write for several years to come. Hell, world, what have I left?