me a year ago

A year ago, I was two weeks away from leaving home for the first time and in the midst of my packing and sorting clothes and whatnot, I took this photograph:

July 2013 was kinda really hectic, my busiest month of the summer. It was sad and stressful and exciting and hazy and very very warm and rainy. And now it is behind me as is most of this summer and nothing really went how I wanted it to in May when I unpacked all my stuff from school and reveled in being home for four whole(ish) months.

Last summer, I spent almost all of my time alone. I watched a lot of TV and a lot of Netflix and didn't read as much as I wanted and spent every single weekend at a graduation party, where I saw all of my friends. Importantly, I spent a lot of last summer in a Really Bad Mood. 

Senior year was really bad and left me hard and raw and unwilling to really hang out with the people I'd spent the last four years laughing and having fun with. It wasn't really their fault. I shut myself off from them so that I could heal on my own, and even though I never let them in, I cursed them for not realizing or caring to notice that I wasn't alright and that I hadn't been in a very long time. (At the time, I didn't REALIZE or CARE TO NOTICE that they were going through their own stuff, too, see how great retrospect is????)

I didn't have a job but I wrote a lot a lot a lot and became even better friends with Rachel (we talked pretty much every day!) and learned a lot about myself by turning inward and thinking. I was excited for college, I guess, but more excited to leave all the hurt of high school behind me and to truly step into my role as an adult (even though in college everyone acts like they're still in high school for, like, two-ish years and I already felt beyond that).

I could write a billion things about college and how even though I literally lost every person I was friends with at university within a week I still really benefitted from the experience, but it would get trite eventually or whatever so I am here to notify that I have changed from the floral printed collared shirted long haired black and white filtered girl at the top of this page, just a lil bit.

I'm happier now than I was then and I feel better about myself and I like the way I look even though I feel small and big at the same time and I feel like I'm actually alive and not just a zombie. My time on my own helped me forge really good friendships via this scary vehicle known as the Internet and I am so glad that I got my year alone to have these friendships that I can't imagine the rest of my life without.

A year ago, I was looking forward to school and to "adulthood" for the wrong reasons. I was excited to get away from my family and my friends and my town and those aren't wrong reasons in the scope of other people but wrong on a personal level and this year, I am looking forward to so much, to my new classes, the possibilities afforded to me by attending university, even to things that are happening before I leave. Last year, it felt like all I ever had to look forward to was escaping, but now I've got so, so much more to be excited about.

And just for the fun of it all here is a pic of me a year later to round out this here article:

(Unfortunately, as it would seem, I look eXACTLY THE SAME!!! Kids entering college this fall DON'T EXPECT YOUR TIME AWAY TO CHANGE YOU you will still look like a little baby when you get home at the end of your first year!!)

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a love letter to my childhood

So much of my childhood is laced in ambiguities that I cannot really dig through the mess to pull out the first. I can remember dreams and colors, can create a memory from a photograph, can tell myself this must be the beginning, but I didn't develop organizational skills early enough to put my memories in order as the happened and instead, I am left with a hazy, diluted mess.

Yet I can remember with astounding clarity the ride to my grandfather's lake house, from waking up at eight in the morning and helping load towels and sunscreen and groceries into the car, to the endless highway. The best part was always the ramp off the highway, the bends in the road that stirred up excitement, until the path to the causeway he lived on appeared. Framed with weeping willows and the Sandusky Bay on either side, it remains the best part of that drive. It is anticipation, the bridge before the chorus, the long stretch of adolescence into adulthood, when being young feels like it is infinite and recurring, that every day will be special.

And then the road curves. The weeping willows are replaced with huge, gray rocks and houses. This is where anticipation was made manifest, in the high rocks, little hands pressed against seats to propel upwards, to see over the rocks, to see the lake. Would it be calm or wavy? Warm or cold? The only way to find out was to strain our necks, to tug at the seat belt restrictions, to unroll dirty windows to see clearly. Just as we caught a good glimpse, though, we would arrive, and the car would turn into the driveway, and we would be able to experience it ourselves.

There was a time that my cousins were my best friends. That every weekend of every summer month was spent in the sunshine. This experience is mine, finite. My supposed children will never know the race into the lake, the burn of sun-soaked sand on anxious soles, the cool relief of diving into the lake water with the ever-present danger of parents looming on the shore, calling us in, bringing us closer. We were children of that house, the lake and bay curved together like parentheses. We were the space between.

We grew up. The parentheses closed. We no longer ate dinner with towels around our waists, eager to jump back in the pool, no, instead, we were busy packing our bags and drying our hair, eager to get home, to the television, to the promise of friends that we had found separately, apart from one another. And we diminished. Older cousins began to go to college, to get married, to start families that would never know those days at the lake, would never feel the anxiety, the excitement, the exhaustion from too much time in the sun. But not just any sun - but this sun. This beach, this house, this pool. Their lives, their experiences with water and sun would be distinct and separate from my own, and as I prepared for college, I felt that iridescent childhood begin to slip away from me, bit by bit.

A day at the lake would be spent in the kitchen, last summer, with my grandpa, or by the pool. In the pool, with my nephews or brothers, occasionally with my cousins and their own children, I came to the startling realization that never again would I regain that all day, everyday experience that only Sandusky could give me. Never again will I reclaim that notion of forever-youth, as though everything was and could be mine, that nothing was out of reach.

Now, perhaps, my childhood is sold away to strangers, a family I will never meet, who will create their own memories in the house whose walls are marked with the stains of my own youth. This tree, that I was pushed into, my knee torn open, this ledge of the pool that we rested blue and pink rafts against and slid into like the pool was eight feet deep rather than five.

Saying goodbye to Sandusky is like saying goodbye to my childhood. It is bitter and it is sweet and it will sorely be missed, not for current usage, as my interests have far outgrown those of the little girl who was always the last to get out of the lake, but missed the way your mouth misses the first teeth it loses. Eventually, something new will grow in.

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