Day 86

View from my bedroom window - Summer 2010

During the summers of my late adolescence and well into the teen years before I could drive, I was the kid that spent her days at home by herself. (For the record, that didn't seem as terribly pathetic then as it does right now reading that sentence.)

It was a circumstance born of being an only child, with working parents, who lived outside of comfortable walking distance from her friends and was too shy to ever invite herself over anywhere.

Many a warm afternoon was spent sheltered in an air conditioned bubble, me trying gamely to reach beyond my dependent, awkward age into a realm of adult suave and ease by absorbing VH1 and MTV in I love the 70s - 90s, Laguna Beach filled hours.

These afternoons were less than stimulating and so, on occasion, I would seek both culture and blessed independence at the local Borders. I would be dropped off early in the afternoon and not be picked up until several hours later, and in the meantime I would wander with (dare I say) giddiness through the Literature and Art sections. I'd thumb through pages of the best publications in history, even though they were far beyond my comprehension. I'd sit and read or listen to music for hours, absorbing this new world with a ravenous hunger.

It was bliss.

From the time I was four to the summer of my 18th year, things remained fairly stagnant in the central plaza of my San Diego suburb. From the flower stand next to Taco Bell to the Starbucks next to Ralph's, I felt secure in the predictability of our epicenter. Even as I write this I can feel the breeze on my face and taste the tang of a Jamba Juice on a bright, Saturday morning, watching the light filter through the sycamores along the street and admiring the latest flora in the corner flower planters.

In my mind, in that place, I am not twenty. I am not more then halfway through my BA in Art History. I am not paying rent and power bills. I am not grown.

There I am a middle schooler with dreams for being able to order a smoothie without feeling like a kid. I am wandering around in PE shorts and worn out Abercrombie t-shirts and barefeet. Those memories make me see a future that is made not of life's realities, but of romantic, and simplified dreams. I wonder what the fourteen year old me would think if we were introduced. What would she think when she saw my overloaded planner and overloaded heart. How would she view my uncertainty? How would I view her naivete? What would we teach one another?

That can never happen and so I'll never know. But I'd like to think I would embrace her optimism and move forward as if the world was mine to conquer, without limitations or fear of failure, that I'd approach adulthood as a world of books and music and art and learning. A world where it is always summer and the flowers are always in bloom.

This week I found out my Borders will be shutting its doors.

Mom and I both agree it must be a sign.

A sign that our constant hometown we are so remiss to abandon is not going to stay constant for much longer. A sign that we must move on to find new joys elsewhere. A sign of sadness. A sign of affirmation.

And all at once the crowd begins to sing
Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same

the fray, "all at once"