Happy in the Meantime

It is no secret that I'm happy in Denver. Living in a city (a small, manageable city, to be precise), is completely fantastic and every day I discover new things to be excited about. Some of my best friends live right here, so I didn't even have to work at getting a social circle. My family is in Denver. I had a job lined up before I even moved. It's like I flew up into the clouds for six years and, though I anticipated a hard landing when I fell back to the Earth, a big group of the people I love the most were stretching one of those giant canvas sheets that a cartoon lands on when it jumps out of a burning building. I had a very soft landing. There is not much more that could have gone right.
But there is a catch. No doubt, some of my elation at being inside this brand new life is a defense mechanism. My blinders point forward, and they are decorated in fireworks of my own making so I don't even wonder about what is going on beyond them. What I know for sure is that St. John exists outside those blinders. The Horseshoe, my tent at Maho, sits in the periphery, breathing the breeze, the roof gently lapping at the ceiling beams, nestled snugly in the trees, waiting for me to remember that it's there.
In the life history of me, I do not process anything important until long after the event happens. Good things, bad things, break-ups, rites of passage. Anything that means anything gets pushed into the back of my mind, as if I am so saturated by what is in front of me that I shut down and things begin to run off of my skin like water droplets from duck feathers. In that malicious moment of fate when you have three too many windows open on your poor, overworked computer and the whole thing crashes, taking your twenty page term paper with it, I tend not to scramble immediately to save the term paper. Priorities forever crossed, I spend time going back to Facebook and Twitter to re-save passwords. The important thing gets overlooked. And months later, I am faced with Monster-fueled nights, face streaked with sleeplessness, eyes and mind tired because the time has come. It can't be put off any longer.
Anyway, that's what I do. And that's what happens. Eventually, I will smell a jasmine candle or hear a tree frog on television and I will be sent reeling, unable to keep myself from missing that gorgeous, simple little place that cradled my heart in its suntanned hands for a while.
So, here is what I am going to do. In an effort to avoid that kind of crash, and in a separate effort to write a well-deserved love letter to my first real object of unmatched affection, I am going to compile a list. Of all the things that made my heart swell there. Of all the things I do not ever want to forget. This will likely be edited, as I will come up with more as the weeks and months pass. But I have to start somewhere. An admission of pining, and of loss, which I have not allowed myself before.



So, here's the thing. I sat down to write this about a week ago. I had just seen some beachy, sunny picture of friends sitting on the sand that I spent so much time on and it seemed like I should have felt something. Since then, I have reopened this post probably 30 times to try and figure out how I was feeling about the whole thing. About the mental and emotional process of leaving a place and a family that sparkled and made me find my own smile. I thought that sadness was in order, here. That moving on is always hard, that you're always left with some residual regret, that you are supposed to wish, at least some of the time, that you were still living your past life. It's true that I generally do not allow myself sadness at the break, and am therefore fated to deal with emotional burdens only when they get so heavy that they can no longer be carried. It is not unreasonable to be worried that this is what is really going on. The unloading of such burdens tends to happen at the shifty hands of whiskey or red wine, and never when I'm ready. It never goes well. So, I thought I would force a purge. Write down everything that brought the corners of my lips down a little. Everything that should hurt to think about. There were visions of a grand list; one full of ambitiously written descriptions of the friendships, the winter swell, the boardwalks, the flowers. My heart would fracture slightly just thinking about all of it. And then it would be lifted. It was a decision to be proactive about mourning, and to kind of just get it out of the way. Because who wants to be sitting there, waiting for something like that to kick in? Not this girl.
But I couldn't do it. I can't do it. Obviously, there are lovely things to be said about that island, and I could certainly come up with an essay that outlines all of them. But I guess I don't really want to. This is weird for me, a girl who generally loves to live in the past and wonder how life might be different had I done this instead of that. Well, let me be more accurate. I like to live in the past in a way that allows me to live in the future. If I had done this, then in a year, I would have been doing some other this. As a rule, the present never factors in much. There is no evident reason for this. It's just the way my brain works. Even at my very happiest, there has been some itch in the corner of my head forcing me to wonder what I could have done differently and where I would have landed then.
But something seems to have shifted a bit. For the first time, maybe in my entire life, my thoughts are not shaded with nostalgia, nor any want for the hypothetical existence I think I could have maybe had.
I have had fights with myself about living in the moment and my maddening inability to do so. I mean, what kind of person can sit on a beach that is used as a Microsoft screen saver and think, "Hm. Would I be happier elsewhere?" Super annoying. Self-consisting conversations have often gone the direction of the hippies that say Namaste and tell you to live in this moment. This one. Right. Now. And there is no telling exactly why, but I'm not sure that I have ever done that.
Until--maybe--now. It does not seem to be an issue of escapism, even though most things do turn out that way. I can look at the pictures that people put up on Facebook and not start checking out plane tickets. The first time I left, I couldn't even look at the pictures. I went so far as to delete friends because it was too difficult to see their constant Caribbean propaganda. It was pretty extreme, to tell you the truth. So extreme that I ran back to that island, needing so much to live in the past that I actually returned to it. But this time feels...not like that that. When the pictures come up, my heart stirs and wiggles a little bit, to be sure. But now, it is a lot like when I look at old pictures from college. I think, "Man, that was a lot of fun. And I could never do it again." It seems that life at Maho, just like another past life in Ft. Collins, has snuggled into the category of bygone days. Once in a while, I expect that it will peek its head out at me. With a timid knock on my door, it will look at me with sad eyes, worried that I have forgotten about it, feeling neglected and cast aside. And I will not be angry when this happens. It will not make me slam the door in St. John's face, which is what I did to Ft. Collins. Nor will it make me want to nod and take it by the hand and go back. It will simply be exactly what it is; a place and I time that I loved desperately, and grew because of, and from which there is no more learning to be done. A past life. Looked on with affection and maybe a little pining once in a while, but with no regret.
And for now, I get to understand the feeling of being content with where you are. A whole new thing to learn! I wonder if this is how people usually go through life. It might be. I have taken part in frustrating conversations, and even frustrating friendships, where the other party seems not to live in any tense but the present. This is usually thought of as good, I understand, but to me...to me, it is just a way to quash dreams. To refuse them air. Living only in the moment also seems like the best way not to acknowledge the things that have made you who you are. Admittedly, I am drawn to, and often distracted by introspection. Too much time spent in my own head searching for my own soul has likely kept me from finding what I might be looking for. Those fireworks-covered blinders keep the periphery out of sight, and I find that much lies in the sidelines.
What is the balance? Maybe that is what all of my searching is for. Level ground, as opposed to the hill I feel I've been standing on, pulled by gravity either to the past or to the future, never comfortable where I am. My great achievement might just be figuring out how to love where I was, wonder where I am going, and remain happy where I am.

Oh, man, I've been rambling for a while. I have had three cups of coffee too many this morning, and my fingers don't seem to want to slow down. Neither does my brain, but I'm used to that part.


In conclusion, yay Colorado! I don't have any answers for how things are supposed to feel. Most of us are blind, I think, putting out sensors and trying not to run into anything or stub our toes. I can not be the only one who doesn't really know what she's doing.

Smart Phones Are Not That Smart

Oh, man. Here we go. I bought a smart phone yesterday; my first and (I think) biggest step into everyone's real world. It was truly out of necessity and nothing else. The thought of wrapping my entire life into a little device that is not even Jamie-proof is a bit ludicrous. The thing isn't anything-proof. For a long time, I have resisted the whole idea of a smart phone. If I really believed that it would remain just a phone and not become a limb and a crutch, it would not have been such a fight. I probably would have gotten one long ago, lured in by Angry Birds and baited by Words with Friends. But a phone should be a phone, really. It should allow one to text and to call and to take pictures of beautiful or funny things and send them to friends. To be honest, the camera thing is even a bit much, although I certainly have taken advantage and sent some nice jealousy shots. A phone should be a phone.
A smart phone is a second brain. One I have seen people lean so hard on that when it gets dropped or cracked or just decides to stop working, as most things with on switches eventually do, the people leaning fall so hard that they can't even stand up without a new one already on the way. You get a phone. You install Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail, Tumblr, news updates, app updates, sports updates, iTunes, a calendar, a memo pad, GPS and you throw in some games because people do not know how to sit still anymore, and suddenly you are not you without the phone. Losing it is tantamount to losing, almost literally, everything you know about yourself.
Now, I'm not exactly one for paper calendars or planners. The primary reason for this newly purchased second brain was my total inability to keep my own schedule. I can write something down in a planner and never look at it again. Without an annoying beeping noise to remind me that I am supposed to go to the wedding of my mother's friend's son this Saturday, the event is entirely forgotten and left behind for the prospect of playing flag football with my friends that same day.
**This is exactly, without exaggeration or altering, why I bought this phone. The wedding is this Saturday. So is football. I have double booked.**
So now I have a portable, talking planner. I am not going to install Facebook. I don't want GPS. I want to be able to survive without the thing, since it will probably get dropped in a toilet or in a snowball fight or something along those destructive lines.
There have been a lot of things to get used to in statesideville. Some are boring, like the cold or the price of rum. Some are less expected, like how difficult it is to remember to give pennies as change, or feeling lonely just because I am not constantly hearing other people's stereos. And one of the things I am trying to get used to is everyone's attachment to their little devices. If anyone has a question about something, Google is right there in your pocket. Dinners with friends are littered with bleeps and songs and spaceship noises, all of which generally need to be attended to immediately. I am not without guilt, here. Even my relic of a phone bleeped rudely with text messages, and I found it difficult not to check it right away. I have turned away from face to face conversations so that I could slide open my electronic life and converse with someone who could have been 3 or 3,000 miles away. But, then, those were text messages. And only text messages. There was never a Facebook bleep. Or one for Twitter. Or an email. I developed a Pavlonian response to a single beep which meant a single thing. I'm not sure that I could handle drooling and fumbling for my phone for multiple bleep types. It's too much.
So I will continue to resist, even as the black rubber-covered thing sits in my purse and begs to be an addiction. I will silence it when I have dinner with friends. I will write directions on pieces of paper and not count on my phone to get me anywhere. I'm not even going to install Angry Birds. There will be a lot of these fights as I walk farther and farther away from that island. But I still have different colored fingernails, I don't have cable, and I will not- NOT - allow my smart phone to be more important than the life that is actually happening right in front of me.