on my way back to where i started.

feelings come to me in the form of lyrics, sometimes. do you feel the same way? songs that sing like poems are the best ones.

i woke up this morning, my eyes sticky from tears. i don't dream much, but when i do, they're nightmares. what does that say about me? probably nothing i don't already know. i'm a happy girl that's got a lot of underlying fears. mostly of things that could happen. i've always viewed it as the happier you are, the more you have to lose. maybe that's pessimistic. i see it as a law of gravity.

i digress, kind of.

i've said it before. never have i felt so many highs and lows in one 365 day period. the highs have been life changing, but the lows have been too long and too frequent. and ever since i've moved back home, this lyric has struck at my heart. not until today did i realize why. (isn't that beautiful? we know ourselves, underneath it all, better than we realize. perhaps our subconscious has got it all figured out. maybe that's why things work out in the end.)

i moved back to the place i grew up, slept across the hall from where i grew up, and dated (then married) the boy i grew up with. returning home should have been the easiest thing in the world. like breathing.

"life" hit. or the things people like to refer to as life but which actually mean heartache. i was sad. sad from too much change, from growing up. sad from being in the same place but everything feeling different. sad at the way things happened and what i saw and how things happened. sad for everything i lost. sad from stress. sad at the fact that i didn't recognize myself anymore. (who am i if i can't wake up and walk to class? drink hot tea after my shift at starbucks? play in the rain at two-o-clock on a wednesday afternoon?)

and suddenly, this place called home couldn't have felt more like death. like a slow, painful, caught under a rock death. but slowly, slowly...something changed. perhaps weight shifted. maybe chemicals flooded back into my brain. but i felt this real and lovely shift and then it was like, oh hello lungs, there you are! somehow you've been pumping away all along.


and now, days and weeks and months away from the heartache, i can see it for what it was. i've been on my way back to where i started. i moved one hundred miles back to my childhood home six months ago and i've just finally arrived. where i can see, feel, taste and touch comfort. things aren't perfect, they're not the same, but they're mine; and life is actually better. i'm better.

sometimes i wonder if it's all worth it. kind of like one of my favorite movies, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. if you could erase it all, the good and the bad, everything that caused your heart to burst to pieces, would you? i don't think i would.

but, i suppose that's what all good romances are about. loving til it (because?) it hurts. and that's what i'm going to keep doing, every single day.