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.

The New Kid

Right now, I am drinking a giant mug of coffee. I made it. I drove to the grocery store, I bought the beans (ground, not whole), grabbed a small container of half and half from a cooler lit with fluorescent lights,and walked a linoleum floored aisle to one of the check out counters with a person behind the register. That person was polite. She smiled at me and asked how I was doing, like you do. She does not know where I live or that I like nail polish or what days I have off from work. So she did not ask or say anything else. I got into my car and drove home, watching the bike lane when I made turns and looking around in awe at the colors that fall creates. I locked my car and unlocked my front door and took my groceries out of their plastic bags, moving them into my refrigerator.
When I woke up this morning, I opened my bag of coffee (ground, not whole)and filled the machine that sits on my black marble counter. I took water straight from the tap, right out of the sink, and pressed "On." The walls of this home hold scent inside, like a hug. They don't let anything out. The don't let anything in. It seems normal for a home to smell like coffee in the morning. It is normal.
I made toast, too. I took two pieces of bread- that I purchased, took out of a plastic bag, and put into a pantry- and put them into a toaster. The toaster sits next to the coffee machine on the black marble counter. It is not rusty, and it's not even new. It toasts the two pieces of bread perfectly the first time, and I put them on my plate, buttered them and sat down by myself at my dining room table. I have a dining room and a table that sits inside, which is probably normal as well. This room smells like coffee, too, and there is a large window that shows more of those fall colors. The walls are painted, not white, and there are framed pictures hanging. The floor is cold. Much colder than I am used to, which is why I am wearing socks inside my slippers.
Today, I do not have to work. There is laundry to be done, and probably a visit to the grocery store. Again. I keep having to go back because there are things I keep forgetting. Like breakfast food. Or something to cook for dinner. Or dishwasher detergent. Things I have not had to think about for years now.
This day is not remarkable. The weather is doing what it should near the end of October in Colorado. If I were to drape a scarf around my neck, maybe my red one because it's soft and the color is nice when my skin is pale, no one would look twice. It would be something anyone around me might do. But I had to try that particular draping method in the mirror a few times before I got it right. They do seem to notice some things, though. Like the way I amble, slack-jawed, through a grocery store, overwhelmed and thrilled and drowning in options. They probably think that I am just slow. They get frustrated with me as I block part of the produce section. They don't know that I am looking, perplexed and bemused, at the hard mangoes on the table next to the giant, alien-head papayas, wondering if anyone thinks that those things are actually ripe or worth eating at all.
I feel childlike most times. As if that Peter Pan complex needed any encouragement. This is pretty awesome; Everything that should not be new is new. Everything that should not be fun is fun. Everything that should not be interesting is novel. Those seashore postcards became boring, and now I can look at the world that has surrounded the people I know and be curious about it, and not be tired of it.
Everyone should be able to do this. Every single person should drift away for long enough that nothing is ever beige again. Not even the produce section of a grocery store, or the simple, underappreciated act of making your own cup of coffee. I'm not sure how to maintain a feeling like this. The best way might to keep track of its progress and give yourself a nice stomp on the toe once in a while if the things around you are not keeping you awake enough. This requires an effort to stay awake, of course. Otherwise, you lose track. And then you are bored again, forgetting that everything around you is absolutely worth seeing.

For Sanity

I left St. John a week ago. At the time, I had no idea how I felt about that. I spent that travel day sad and stressed, trying to sort through the tangles in my head and figure out if leaving was really the right thing to do. For what it's worth, I am still not totally sure and I am prepared to regret the decision at least a little for most of forever. I don't suppose that leaving a beautiful place is ever easy. But as I left Maho, my friend and (sadly) former roommate, Megan, slipped me a little square envelope. She said, "Reading material. For when you have some time." That little envelope is the only thing that kept me inside my own skin the day I left. I know a few people who would probably feel the same way about what was inside...



From, "Through Painted Deserts: Light, God and Beauty on the Open Road," by Donald Miller.



*Author's Note:



I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known where, I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the West hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.

And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace South to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; They have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change... All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was.

Caged Birds

Holy crap, it's happening. Nononononono. I have to keep it together and remember why I'm leaving, because the logic and rational thought that bought my plane ticket out of here is beginning to fade in the wake of the last beautiful week and this beautiful day and what the hell am I doing? What sane person leaves this? There is so much more to see, but damnit, there is so much here.

The desktop background on my computer right now is a watercolor quote by John Webster that says, "We think caged birds sing when indeed they cry." It's been set that way for months. The second a place starts to feel like home, some little alarm goes off in my head. It sounds like a screaming kettle most often, like my entire head might fly off if I don't pay attention rightthissecond. It sets a fire beneath my feet that sends me into some sparked panic and it feels as if leaving wherever I am immediately is the only way to cool back down. The kettle has been screaming for about a year now, I think. So, I turn up the volume on my iPod and watch too many movies and try my best to remain happy where I am. To not want to up and run again. To allow myself to feel at home somewhere.

But the panic has gone rogue now, and I am not sure how to rip myself away from this place. This is backwards. Too much time has been spent here and I should be itching to get away. To be uncomfortable again, to move to a place I've never heard of, to be curious and interested and lost. Do other people feel that? The allure of being lost? I'm drawn to the word and the concept, which does not make a whole lot of sense. Don't most people spend their time trying to find a place they would like to stay? All I want is the next place to leave. Or so I thought.

I will never understand why people want to be at total ease in their lives. Comfortable. Where is the fun in that? Where is the challenge? Find a place you do not understand. Stay until you do. Repeat. It's like molting. It is almost impossible to grow when all you do is stand still. There has never been a place that made me stop thinking about what the next one could be like.

But. For reasons I will not explain, I have had this island to myself again for a little while. I am in love again. St. John, you are forgiven for your post office and your tropical storms and your bewitchery. Let's get back to where we were when leaving was the last thing I could have imagined wanting. My feet are back on the ground, and on my own terms. There is peace in it; something I never wanted. Something I would never ask for. The closest comparison I can think of is that guy you don't know that well who comes up and starts massaging your shoulders. You're not that into it. It's awkward and you wish it was not happening. But then he stops and you think, "Wait, that felt good! Where did that guy go?"

I am effed. I want to stay. I want to leave. Both equally, it seems. There is some serious mutual exclusivity there. The wanting to stay part is tilting my universe. The feeling is new and unwelcome, and something I am (so predictably) trying to escape. The feeling also does me no good, if I am to be honest with myself. The Caribbean has me for one more month. St. John has me for two more weeks. The tickets have been purchased, the after-move plans made, the airport pick-up arranged. At this point, my only option is to buckle up and hope it doesn't sting so much that I can't bear it.

There are people who live their entire lives running from place to place. Bouncing, maybe, or floating like soap bubbles, making purples and blues out of sunlight and bursting when they finally land. Not subject to gravity, or at least not willing to succumb without protest. I've always wanted to float like that. To be prismatic and weightless. To live by Kerouac and The Shins and to not ever regret leaving. And if we are talking about the dangers of gravity, then it must be kept in mind that St. John has more weight to it than any other place I have ever lived.



Leaving could be the saddest thing I ever do to myself. Staying, the meanest. This is going to be messy.

If A Tape Recorder Existed in My Head

I have nothing to say right now. But I did when I was traveling the other week, so here goes nothing. For lack of anything new sitting inside my head and because it's raining like hell and what else am I going to do right now? The airport ramblings of a girl who spends too much time in airports...This is going to be entirely random and clearly stream of consciousness. I had a cloudy travel head. That much will be clear...

Why do I always feel compelled to write on airplanes? I haven't been writing that much over the last three years and I can tell. I feel sort of captive inside my own head, and I'm not good at it anymore. I have got to get better about this.
Unless they're on business, most people seem to travel with other people. Especially from vacation places. Which means that I am one of not very many on this flight without a co-flier. I generally like it that way, but it would be nice to have a shoulder to fall asleep on for some of these airplane hours I keep logging.
Why do I love drinking tomato juice in the air? I am wearing a white shirt on a bumpy plane and I went with tomato juice. It's not like I'm incident free, either. More times than not, I spill the stuff all over the place. I just can't stay away.
And why does anyone order those snacks that you have to pay for up here? This is a three hour flight. That bag of cashews cost you $5.00. You really couldn't wait? Maybe that's where the tomato juice comes in. It's salty and kind of thick, so my stomach thinks I've eaten. Ha! Duped again, American Airlines! I don't need your stupidly expensive cashews. Gotcha!
So, when you live in the Caribbean, you venture into everyone else's everyday for vacation. Colorado bound now, and I'll even make my way to Lincoln, Nebraska this time. As if you could get any more normal.
Would you see a rainbow if you flew over it?
Off to the land of every day, where I will be thrilled by everything from seeing peaches in the grocery store to the number of country music radio stations. Where I get to drive more than 6 miles, which is as far away anything on St. John is from anything else on St. John. If I want something to eat and it's not already in the fridge, I can just drive to a store at ANY TIME. Even after 8:30pm! The world of suburbia is so convenient that they've lost track of how immediate and easy everything is. I will not be taking that for granted.
From here, I can play the game where you name what a cloud looks like, but I can do it in 3D. The one we're flying past looks like a dolphin swimming through coral heads. But I bet it doesn't look that way from the ground.
Three rock stars on a stage of smoke machines and dry ice mist. The rock stars sort of look like gummy bears. But whatever.
Clouds are awesome.
There are a million tiny ones, all the same shape. An aerial army of marshmallow peeps.
Hello, Miami. Why anyone would want to bludgeon to death a white beach with a city's worth of high-rises is beyond me.
Oops, there I go. Something you have to be careful about in life, and maybe in transient life even more, is arrogance about the way you live and how you see the world. We believe ourselves to be quite the enlightened lot, we leaders of unconventional lives. With full passports and full photo albums, we have seen a lot of places. We have met a lot of people. We have been on uncomfortable adventures and been tested on how well we can roll the with the proverbial punches. And I can't imagine wanting to go to a hotel-ridden beach any more than the people in those hotels can fathom wanting to stay in a sardine-tin hostel in Picadilly, sharing bunk beds with 5 German strangers who snore and smell a little pickled.
Travelers often assume that everyone envies their lifestyle. Which is because travelers are told by just about everyone how enviable their lifestyle is. But, it's not always, and you can't think that those people actually want your life. They don't. Stop seeing yourself through such a soft lens. My 9-5 friends know which bed they'll be sleeping in a year from now. They are not afraid of buying nice things, because they probably will not have to pack those nice things into boxes and leave them in storage for long and undefined amounts of time. They come home to their warm homes and warm families every night. They have gardens and Christmas and big dogs. All of these things they have, and I do not.
So far, the man with two straw hats is the best airport dude I've seen, followed closely by zebra blouse and super shiny galaxy full of rhinestones belt lady. Ooh! Matching terrible Hawaiian shirts; one pink and one blue. They are going somewhere to drink pink frozen things with paper umbrellas floating, leaking into them.
People who have to run through airports are always so awkward about it. Trying to keep their cool. Panicked faces and a quick-footed hop trot, but those hands stay firmly at their sides. Utter refusal to let the whole body participate in the freak out, for fear that they might look freaked out. Worried? Who's worried? Nah, man, I'm cool. Who's worried?
Why don't they make light up shoes for adults? They should.
Burly, gnarly dude with a tiny pink roller suitcase. No child in sight. What?
If I wore high heels on a travel day, I would die. I mean that.
Why don't men wear brimmed hats anymore? It's a shame. They're really hot.
Leggings really are accepted as pants in the states. Yes! The more my clothes are like pajamas, the happier I am.
I envy that little kids can saunter through an airport with their beloved stuffed animals in their arms and it's not weird and no one stares. I have to keep mine in my backpack.
Everyone is either dressed for their tropical vacation destination or they are wearing largely lettered shirts telling the world where they have just been. Right now, it seems as if a lot of people heart Miami. Oh, that one says, "I was in Miami, bitch." Why?
Men have to be very careful. Khakis, if too light in color, can easily be confused with white pants, which are far less acceptable. Even though it's not even Labor Day yet.
Ooh! An airport yoga-er. Amazing. Either assuming that no one is watching or hoping that everyone is.
The serious looking security people are wearing helmets on Segways. I do not take them seriously.
She does not know that her fashion-forward shorts look very, very much like a diaper. Someone she loved should probably tell her that.
"It's a satchel!"
How are Segways effective? I find it hard to believe that they could move any more quickly than a fairly able human could run. And shouldn't security people be in shape, anyway? What else is going to be invented so that no one anywhere ever has to move ever again?
So many sensible shoes on all of these airport employees.
What would people watchers say about me, I wonder? "Oh, she's a bit mousy. She would be prettier without the glasses." (Yeah, but then I would look like the dumb lost girl because I wouldn't be able to see the gate numbers. Is that better?) "And why is she wearing orange shoes? I don't get that." (Hey, lay off. I like my orange shoes.)
I like people who drape their sweaters around their shoulders and secure them with clean, preppy sweater-sleeve knots. I could never pull something like that off. So prim.
A man wearing a pirate hat!
Ooh, the wheels on that woman's roller suitcase light up. Cool. Maybe that is the grown up version of the shoes.

Annnnd it ends there. Maybe that's where the Dramamine kicked in and I fell asleep. In case no one knew, Dramamine is better than Nyquil. For real.


I have nothing of my own to say now. Time to drink some wine and be glad that at least something got put on this ridiculous blog.

Fitting In

A life without tourists. Without sunscreen bottles or ill-conceived islandy outfits. No seagulls. No acid spiders. My clothes will not mold, and I won't feel with my skin every whim of the sky. Looking out the window will show me a 14,000 foot mountain capped in snow. If the sun is shining just the right way, that mountain will glow pink and I will wonder why I ever left Colorado.
Then I'll remember that the view I left that mountain for was just as beautiful.
You don't see too many rainbows in the Rockies, but there a whole season full of them here. The islands got the sweet side of that gene pool, huh? Hibiscus blooms and mango trees and elkhorn coral and parrotfish and bougainvillea. As if the universe had an excess of its most striking colors and decided to drop all of them in one place.
You know what else likes all of these colors? Mosquitoes. But being ready for something does not necessarily make it any easier, does it?
Days like today are terrifying because they're perfect. This island is so damn crafty. It rained just enough this morning to cool everything down a little and now the sun is here. It's the right time of year for the butterflies, who ride on the scent of plumeria that weaves itself into the breeze. And the breeze is a specific kind, gentle and warm and intimate. I feel like I am being dared to leave. Like St. John is betting me twenty bucks that I won't really be able to do it.
This island woos you to stay even as it is pushing you away. If St. John were a dude, I would dump him for sending so many mixed signals.
As it stands, I think the break up is more mutual than that. When people ask why I'm leaving (And they do. All the time.), all I can do is smile and that that it is just time. Too simple for most, but the truth just the same.
So, a life without sunscreen. I will be able to go downtown and not see anyone that I know. I won't have to stand in line for every meal. My work life and my personal life will actually exist in different places.
Fitting back in will be a feat, won't it? Part of what is so great about St. John is that there really are no taboos. The only think people will judge you for is judging other people unfairly. There are three prominent bumper stickers pasted on all of the local cars; One says, "St. John: The world's largest open air asylum." Another, "We're all here 'cause we're not all there." And my favorite says only "Coexist."
Weirdness is sought after and wildly, loudly celebrated. In a world like this, inhibitions and social filters are few. So few, in fact, that we have all pretty much lost track of what our own weirdnesses are. Everything feels normal when nothing is identified as strange. So, plop us back into a world of image-consciousness and we become the "off" people who paint their toenails a million different colors and think it's funny when we accidentally clean our whole houses in wind shield wiper fluid (That WAS funny, by the way. Vineyard people just thought it was..well..weird.) I am quite sure that nothing I own can be considered fashionable beyond just being beachy, and beachy does not work in Colorado in October. I will probably still take cold showers and you will be able to follow flip flop prints in the snow if you want to find me, shivering in a corner somewhere wondering what the hell I was thinking when I decided to come back.
I'll get sinus infections from climate control and I won't have any clue what music/movies/TV shows people are talking about. I will show up at the downtown Friday night clubs in denim cut-offs again, and I will not understand why everyone looks at me like I'm crazy. And then I'll try to walk out of one of those bars with a beer I have not finished yet and it will be my turn to look at them like they're crazy when they tell me no.
I am probably not that apt to fit in anywhere, maybe ever again. I'm ok with that, but I will meet people who are not.
There is no back-up plan, here. It will all work out and I am better for having spent these years on this island. But this is about to be a very different road than the one I have been on...