http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv3-vANWwcU
I flew back from North Carolina this morning.
It wasn't easy.
I fell asleep on the planes, ate a cheeseburger in Dallas - the lone solace of sad airline travel, my ability to forgive myself for devouring terrible fast food. I read a book borrowed from my beloved's shelf, and I don't say beloved lightly, because he is the lone source of sunshine, perpetual and actual, in the trans-state mess that seems to be my life right now.
This sounds like a Xanga post, I know.
I was supposed to graduate on Saturday. I've seen pictures on Facebook of my peers, all capped and gowned, and I'm not with them. I'm here, in my parents' house, a bottle deep in wine, typing in a white box.
I tried not to think about it, but I still do. I still do. I will, for a while.
But there was some glory in my visit to North Carolina. I finally bedded the beast of my old DUI, stood meek and scared in front of a judge in my nice interview clothes and had my sentence doled out. I went and ate oysters afterwards. I sat at a table on the sidewalk and enjoyed the Front Street Brewery's Black and Razz--half raspberry wheat beer, half oatmeal stout--and read my book and smoked my cigarettes. And I was with Dean, and we spent a lazy, cloistered Saturday in his apartment brewing beer and drawing comics and playing Rock Band and dancing and baking bread, and it was only sad when I was piping Bon Iver through the speakers.
But.
All in all, it was an ugly, angry reminder of everything I've done wrong. I'm not hooded with the colors of my graduate school. I sent a plea on a social network and met silence, and I'm used to that, but it still stings.
In short, I have no idea what I'm doing, and I exhaust myself with would'ves, could've, should'ves.
And I torture myself when no one else will. I make my boyfriend into people he isn't, then realize that portrait is unbelievable; he is not a black cowboy with a PhD and chef skills and a hefty inheritance. He isn't, because no one is.
What he is is a boy who takes me to the Battleship North Carolina Dock Diving event solely so I can pet all possible dogs. What he is is someone who pays for our fancy sushi meal and doesn't mind when I fall asleep on his chest while we watch The Hunger Games. What he is is more and less than I could ever imagine, but none of that matters because he is real.
I scrawl in my notebook on the plane and catch the wife in the seat next to me eyeballing, and I want to tell her, yes, this is what I do, but no one wants it. I want to ask her sunburned husband where they've been, and how was it, and were they really, actually happy, or was it a vacation just to get away from themselves and the lives they've made. Do they regret it? Do they fantasize about elsewheres, and hows, and whos?
Because it's scary, to be so simply content. To sit at the counter and doodle while Dean brews beer. To walk around the old cemetery and peer at the names and think about ghosts, then find the trellis walkway where his brother was married and kiss while the swans swim in the lake. To find a conch, a full, total conch shell buried in the sand and carry it back, leave it on his desk, a testament to one stunning afternoon of sun and sand and pelicans, beer and oaks, movies, love.
I was in my workout clothes, having danced like a fool in his living room, reeking of cigarettes and my face unmade, and he said, "This is what our future will be." We said a lot of goofy shit in the meantime, ridiculous jokes, imaginary personalities, but that phrase sticks to my heart and makes me hopeful.
I'm back in Oklahoma. I'm in my parents' house, 25, the day after I should've graduated. I'm a bottle deep and terrified when I stop to consider it all.
But I'm hopeful. And that, kids and friends and readers, is love. That's actual. That's true. That's wild and foolish and crazed and great, and it's good, and it's real, and it's mine.
