snow

It hasn’t snowed like this in Colorado since I was maybe nine years old. The kind of snow that pours and sticks to the ground and stays for day. My therapist calls it “proper winter,” and I guess she’s right. Like that’s the thing Gaby explained to me every time I said I wanted to live in California because the seasons are less harsh. I said I hate watching everything die every winter, and she said “that’s an important part of life too though,” and I didn’t really understand how being physically distant from winter would affect me. But there really is something about being in winter that my body is accustomed to.

I don’t know. I might just be having a rough semester. I went home five weeks in, because I was waking up every day feeling pain in my chest and the idea of home was the only thing making it go away. I’m trying to outgrow my victim mentality. I’m trying to hold on to myself while EMDR reorganizes my mind. Some neural pathways of mine have opened up, and I suddenly have access to all these images and scenes of my childhood that I lost for so long, and it’s really hard to not break down with overwhelming emotion every time I think about all of it.

I really think I grew up too fast. I was so ready to get out and go somewhere and now all I want is to go back. I know at this point that’s pretty much all I talk about. I just don’t really know how to be alive anymore. Last night I had a dream where I was talking to my AP Lit teacher, and it was really weird because I woke up and had to reorient myself. This is happening almost every morning. I have a dream where I’m talking to someone who doesn’t talk to me anymore, and I wake up and I feel really alone and I have to figure out where I am again. It’s like a daily struggle to decide who I want to be and what I want in any given moment, and I get it wrong so much of the time and the damage is irreparable.

I remember when I left home on Monday morning, my dad woke me up to say goodbye. He said “I know it’s a struggle sometimes, but it’s so that you’ll appreciate it more,” and he patted my shoulder like he always does and hugged me goodbye. I wish all the recent memories I have of my father weren’t instances where one of us was saying goodbye, but I don’t live in my parent’s house anymore and even though I know the door is always open it’s 1,000 miles away and it’s really hard to not feel so alone all the time.

I know it will be a struggle no matter what. I know the idea that someday I will find a happy ending is a fallacy, because life doesn’t end until it does. But knowing doesn’t make it easier. I don’t know. I feel really confused all the time, and I can feel the universe responding to that with the bizarre state of everything in my vicinity lately. I don’t know. I need to get out of here again. I need to go home again. I need to walk through a foot of snow and have to find Kati’s grave in freezing weather again. I need to cry and to have my mom holding me, to wake up in my own room, alone, not in a cabin, hungover, in someone’s arms, feeling disgusting and ashamed of myself. Which is where I woke up this morning. So.

It’s a struggle. All I want to do is run away. I want to drive the pan-American highway. I want to go to Japan. More than anything I want to make things the way they were before. I didn’t need a tarot reading to tell me that there is nothing left for me, that what has been broken cannot be repaired, but hearing it still burns like acid in my kidneys. I miss walking. I miss talking about housing like it would be fun to all go out and look at places. I miss playing pool with Charlie when I was stoned. Last semester, we won our first futsal game in this surprising complete turn of events, and this semester we auto forfeited. And I guess not to make a dumb comparison but that’s really how this semester feels.

I was the most fucked up I’ve ever been last night. I don’t know what happened. It all felt like a blur. I know I’ll just block it from my memory to deal with it. I wish that wasn’t how I dealt with things. I’m trying so hard to change. I’m trying to stop closing myself off from the past until I’m so far removed I just look back and miss it, because sometimes the missing is unbearable. I know the only reason I’m able to cope with losing Kati is that I buried so many of our memories in some place I can’t access. Like the parts of my childhood that EMDR is bringing back to me, most of the emotions related to Kati are locked somewhere I can’t reach them. And I know I am doing that now. It just hurts too much to open them.

That’s why some nights, I’ll let myself look at Eli’s website. I’ll log into a different instagram to look at his photos. I’ll go through his spotify. I guess maybe this is weird, but sometimes I just need to feel the pain again. It’s the only thing that ties me to that entire part of my life, and sometimes I want to remember. When I went home I spent a lot of time driving around late at night, thinking about how I separate my life out in distinct eras, and how I have such a hard time looking at it as this one, continuous narrative.

I’m trying really hard to change all of it. I’m trying to reach out before it’s too late. I miss Kati. I miss Jared. Some days I even miss Eli. I don’t want to end up missing anyone else more than I already do. I’m so tired of missing people. I’m trying so hard to change.