Chapter Eleven

January 7, 2010

It’s odd – yet completely normal – how life goes on without you. I hadn’t really thought about it before until I came home for the holidays this year.

I’ve been living on my own for four going on five months now and hadn’t gone home in three. The last time I graced the streets of the “Minne Apple” school was beginning. Nothing felt too different because I was home and visited campus (I don’t advise doing that for recent grads…it feels REAL awkward). However, this time around I felt…strange. My sense of self was noticeably different as were my attitudes towards, well, everything. The drama of school, dance and people’s lives, while still important to me, didn’t feel as significant as they used to. Is that maturity? It is disillusionment? I don’t have an answer at the moment.

Disillusion is probably the best way to describe where I’m at in life right now. I feel like I’m at a cusp. A crossroad perhaps. I have to go one way or another. I can’t go backward so therefore I can only go forward. Perhaps I’ve lost taste for home in some respects because home isn’t “home” but neither is Chicago. True, I’m becoming increasingly more comfortable here but I feel that it’s going to take much longer to slip and call it “home.” I believe slips of the tongue hold a certain amount of truth. Freud may have had that right…but I won’t be the one to judge.

I watch as life changes for my closest and dearest friends. Grad school. Moving to larger cities. Getting “real” jobs. Marriage. God help us if someone starts having kids! I think my brain might implode if that happens anytime soon. I don’t know why but I feel as though I’m being left behind on those journeys. I shouldn’t…hell I was the first one to move away and do the “dance thing.” It’s just that I don’t feel like I’ve found my place yet…it still feels like I’m grasping at straws. Maybe the gloom of winter is getting to me. I need a sun lamp.

2010, how will you play out?