It's strangely cloudy tonight, cloudy and gloomy like it used to be back East, in a different land, in a different life. Under normal circumstances, I'd think there's a freakish change in the weather coming. But tonight, I'll accept it as the gift that I'd like to think it is...a birthday gift, of sorts. Three years ago today I came to California.
I keep typing sentences, inane sentences with these empty, vapid words that clutter up the page, kind of like the cheap trinkets and knick-knacks and cosmetics and accessories I buy that are actually worthless, just cluttering things up. I don't think there's any words I can really summon to effectively describe these last three years, and the hopes and disappointments and realizations and resignations that I encountered...there are no words that can effectively summarize the life--such as it is--that I have made for myself here.
It all simply comes back to that thing that my friend Deshka and I told each other, over and over, during that bleak winter and spring of 2006:
It is what it is.
And so it is just that--it is I, who sacrificed a good man to my stubbourn pride within six weeks of moving here. It is my life here, my life of work and not much else. It is the consequence of me trusting one too many of the wrong kind of man, the bad kind, one too many times. It is the friends I have made here, the younger-than-me girls that seem to have it more together than I do, the older-than-me women who talk (a lot) about plastic surgery, it is the harsh sunshine and relentless dust, it is the bird that sings every night, just after midnight, right outside my bedroom window. It is the stubbourn, dogged and ultimately fruitless commitment I maintained for two of those three years, commitment to a boy that didn't really want me that much. It is the gut-numbing, limb-freezing terror that siezes me every time I feel the floor tremble or hear the windows rattle. It is the Pacific Ocean, still freezing cold and foreign to me, it is the three-hour-time difference between me and those who know me and my life, it is the three years of priceless work experience, it is three years in which I can count on two hands the number of cloudy days we've had.
It is all of these things...until it just isn't anymore.
I don't know when that will be. A month ago, the thought of staying here for countless more years made me want to weep with frustration and fear. Tonight, as I drink a glass of Shiraz and listen to the fan hum behind me and keep one eye on the chick-flick I've got playing, and as I watch my cats fight each other, annoyed with the vigorous brushing I gave them both, I understand that it doesn't just happen right now, overnight, on demand. I don't know when it's going to happen. And right now, at this moment, I'm okay with it.
That feeling will pass. But it's here for now, and for that I am grateful.
Happy birthday to me.
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