it's a reality i have difficulty imagining. living age zero to eighteen in one room, maybe longer. the same four walls keeping me in, keeping me safe. bed after bed occupying and reoccupying the space, swelling as my limbs stretched past the edges, then shrinking again to accommodate the kingdom of literature i was destined the cultivate. friends sharing sleepovers, years of pillow gossip and abandoning laughter and crying angry, ugly tears. comfort in the banally familiar, in memorizing patterns of shadows cast by street lamps on gritty asphalt. comfort in the ways to school, in the consistent curriculum, in the things i didn't realize existed until it was too late to ask for them.
sometimes, i crave that knowing so fiercely that i can't breathe. i wish for a life so very different from my own, if only to see if i might have become someone just as different. i can't change the chemistry of my brain -- i believe i was born wounded -- but i can't help but question the role that my rootlessness played in the evolution of my illness.
contrary (perhaps) to the description of this blog, i love the life i've lived. i love the diversity of being i have experienced, the variety of culture i have come to appreciate (even when i didn't/don't understand it). i have met so many amazing people, learned languages, seen history paved in cobblestone that i never could have known without my very specific set of circumstances.
i love plenty of things i hate. i love things that have scarred me, that have made it harder for me to exist. and i could hardly expect to find happiness in the present without coming to love my past. but i also couldn't love it without making sense of it, without exploring what that past has made me into, what i have allowed to shape my daily experience.
i'm not sure where this post is headed.
the places i've lived, the houses i have inhabited and vacated too quickly to leave even my fingerprints behind, were is some ways the best i could have had. i was always curious about the world beyond my chain-link fence. but those houses won't remember me, and not for their lack of sentience. too greatly do i wish my story mattered to someone besides me, as if their caring would lend credence to my suffering and joy. as if it is not enough for me to know, remember, take stock in them.
i don't know what i'm wishing for, really.
