Complications

I was snowed in all day. I awoke to a silent morning, something rather unusual in the bustling neighborhood I live in, even for a Sunday. Everything was so still and peaceful and untouched. The world outside looked as though it had been frozen in time, and I followed its lead and silently stood still by the window, allowing my mind to rest. I soaked in the quiet dawn and thought about everything, and then about nothing, and then about the beauty of everything and nothing. I stood there for what felt like forever, just existing.

When I later got bored and went to turn on the TV, I discovered the snow had screwed up my satellite and I would have to spend the day without it. It’s strange how inconvenient I found it, how utterly dependent I’ve seem to become on the availability of mindless entertainment. It scared me, quite frankly, to know that I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself without my TV or car. After reading a few poetry books and blogs, I found myself digging through old things I’d written.

And then there it was, the autobiography I had written as my final English project for high school, over fifty pages of my every thought and experience and opinion about who I was at eighteen. It’s almost three years later, and I can still feel the exact emotion I felt writing each word. Reading over it now, I recalled to the surface the girl I once was, the girl who had grown so faint since then. It’s amazing to think how absolute the world seemed then, how frozen in time like this morning’s snow. It’s amazing to think that I was ever so certain of myself.

I remember sitting down to write my autobiography, only to discover that I was terrified of being uninteresting. I had just finished reading Angela’s Ashes and Catcher In The Rye for the millionth time, and I was so disappointed that I hadn’t had more upset in my life to write about. I was so utterly saddened by my boring little life. It seemed so much less significant to write about my privileged happy childhood than it would be had I been unlucky and angry with the world. I was so jealous of those with depressing childhoods. I really wanted angst.

It arrived a few years late. That rebellious, angry, hurt, emotional person I had wanted to be as a teenager didn’t hit me until the very end of my teenage years and into my early twenties. I was unhappy at school. I left. I started a job I disliked. I began a new school far bigger and more alienating than anywhere I had attended before. My mom moved out of our house. My car that I’d had for my entire childhood died, followed quickly by the cat that I’d had for my entire life. My parents finalized their divorce. I fell into a deep depression. My dad moved out. I watched my friends move on to bigger and better things as I stayed behind. We sold our house. We moved into a new house with our mom. My dad and I stopped speaking. I dropped out of school for the semester. My sister-in-law lost her baby three months into the pregnancy. My grandfather died. Things got complicated.

I spent the day reading over the things that used to seem like the end of the world; little fights with friends and getting caught drinking and smoking and making a fool out of myself occasionally. This was the best I could come up with. This was all that I could conjure up to be angry about, and I wrote about it all, every little detail that would somehow make me seem more honest and exciting and real. I wanted so badly to struggle.

And now I have, I am, and while I wouldn’t want to change anything that’s happened to me because I think it helped me grow, there’s still a part of me that spends each and every day trying to get back to that girl I was when I wrote this autobiography. I spend each day trying to get back to that life that I was so desperate to get out of. Everything then was simple and certain and happy. Everything then made sense. Now it’s all so complicated, so damn complicated, and I miss the innocence of my former self. I fear that kind of simplicity will haunt me as the kind of life I never appreciated, the kind of life I took for granted, the kind of life that I’ll never see again. I worry that beneath the new layer of snow, the earth is fading into a distant memory of itself, the way the girl I once was stands faintly outside my window behind my reflection; waving, waving.