Glad to be Home

I'm glad to be home. Don't get me wrong- London was amazing. So much more amazing than I ever could have imagined it would be. It wasn't even really the city so much, but more the people who were with me, that made it so amazing. But that's beside the point. London was incredible, yes. And Houghton was great too. I have enjoyed my months out and about in the world. But finally, ten long months later, I am glad to be home.

I am glad to be back at home, sharing my tiny bedroom in our tiny condominium with my nagging older sister. I'm glad to be home picking her hair snarls out of the drain in the shower. I'm glad to be home doing my laundry in a room that's only two yards from my bedroom, with my favorite laundry detergent, and getting to pick it up whenever I want. I'm glad to be home eating food with salt in it again, drinking Poland Spring Lime flavored seltzer water and Nantucket Nectar Lemonades and eating Greek Salads from the town pizza house with Cape Cod Potato Chips. I'm glad to be back eating dried pasta out of the bag. I'm glad to be able to give myself a pedicure: nail file, nail polish, remover, and Bath and Body Works walnut foot scrub included. I'm glad to be back home catching up on episodes of Glee and watching my roommate's Netflix and listening to Kimbra and Michael Jackson and Kaki King.

I'm glad to be home where we put cream in our coffee and I can go buy cosmetic products at Lush. I'm glad to be home spending nights in my friend's hot tub or around a campfire doing absolutely nothing. I'm glad to be home smelling the smell of wet dog- invading my bed, my blankets, my pillows. I'm glad to be home, following asleep with her curled up under my arm every night. I'm glad to be home doing book inventory for my old high school English teacher, squashing bugs, sleeping without air conditioning, trying to watch So You Think You Can Dance on a TV that doesn't get cable, listening to crap local radio. I'm glad to be home where there's internet access in my bedroom and the sun in Boston beats down on your shoulders and the people are obnoxious and the people are fast and the coffee is plentiful.

I'm glad to be home, where there are always peanut M&M's, but you can never find the hand held phone, and where I can tell you the name of someone who works in every building down the main street. I'm glad to be home where the smell of the salt sea fills the air when it rains and we never run out of coffee mugs and I can hug my best friend and spend all day with him and his freckles and still miss him when I get home. I'm glad to be home where the only thing you can do when you're eighteen is vote and everything closes by 9 and my parents try to impose curfews on me and I'm absolutely dead broke.

I'm just glad to be home.

Simple Joys and Christmastime

Today I went to a second-hand clothing shop in Cambridge called The Garment District. I bought 11.6 pounds of clothing for $11.60. I bought three more shirts for around $9 bucks each (they were deemed too nice to go into the dollar-a-pound pile) and also, a hat. I love a good hat. And I love a good bargain. Some of the clothes are, well- understandably discarded by others. But I can make them into something cool, I think. I think almost anything can look cool. It's all about the confidence of the person wearing it.

It rained today: it should've snowed. But even without the snow, tomorrow is still Christmas Eve, and I'm glad. I've discovered something about being home that I never used to know. Since college is in New York and the only time I'm ever home is during school break, it's become a lot more enjoyable of a place. The only things I associate home with anymore are hanging out with people I love, sleeping late in my old bed, playing with my dog: just relaxing. It's really lovely. I like being home so much more now than I ever did in high school. I like it a lot.

I drank a lot of coffee today, far too much- I can't really have caffeine anymore since it does terrible things to my body, but I'm indulging because it's the holidays. Currently I'm in my favorite pajamas (my favorite pajamas always consist partially of worn, faded, over-sized t-shirts.) They're not sexy pajamas, my friend pointed out to me. She said she could picture me, married someday, writing, wearing my skirts all day and then getting home to my cold apartment and climbing in bed with my laptop and my oversized t-shirts and my glasses next to my husband...She can picture my whole life very well. Apartments and the city in the winter and simple joys, takeout meals and candlelight and cheap living all around. Book-reading and throw rugs and things that are broken and things that are recycled and creative and homemade and a lot of making do. I think it sounds like an okay picture.

I'm sitting in my bed, surrounded my my secondhand clothes, watching Bridget Jones' Diary, which is a fairly terrible movie, except I love Renee Zellweger and I love Hugh Grant and I love Colin Firth, and I love Jane Austen remakes too, even crappy ones. And anyway, BJD is one of those crappy movies that I love to indulge myself in once in a while. I'm watching it and eating homemade fudge: one of the perks of having a mother whose a 2nd grade teacher: at Christmastime she gets lots of presents from the kids, and one of those presents is always, inevitably, fudge.

I'm also listening, while I write this, to my winter playlist. Right now it consists of Feist's new album, "Metals", particularly the songs "Graveyard" and "How Come You Never Go There". It also consists of Greg Hansard and Marketa Irglova's song "Falling Slowly", The Civil Wars' song, "Poison and Wine", Lana Del Rey's song, "Video Games", Kate Nash's song, "Nicest Thing", Snow Patrol's song, "Set Fire to the Third Bar"...and well, a lot of other music I'm not going to list right now. But it's beautiful stuff, and it's perfect for the mood I'm in right now. (It's not all depressing, I only listed the sadder songs, because they're what I'm listening to now. They seemed fitting.)

I wrote a long post about tattoos and things, and I'm sorry I didn't post it last week like I said I would. It needs editing and such, but I'm off to watch the rest of the movie now, and eat more fudge, and enjoy my new clothes, and enjoy the rest of my evening. I'll post it in the near future, but until then, Merry Christmas to you all. Take baths while you're home, listen to "Metals", light candles, gaze at your Christmas tree, go into the city at night, try to ice skate if you get a chance, wear scarves and hats and mittens, see old friends, hold hands, sleep late, and drink coffee. Let your souls be brightened, because it is that time of year. I wish you all peace and happiness, if only for this holiday. Tis the season.

Meanwhile, if you're desperate for some good reading and this blog has once again let you down, maybe this will satisfy you till I get some better stuff posted up: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/one-sentence-love-story/. I certainly enjoyed it.

I Didn't Wash My Hair

I want to write tonight about home. Home is such an abstract concept and I don't even really think I understand it, or have the words to describe what I think it is.

I actually feel very conflicted about the concept of home right now. I've just returned to my little town in Massachusetts for the first time after leaving for New York three months ago. We drove in around nine o'clock last night. Everything was dark and sparkly, the lights were on and there were cars were on the road, lots of them actually. It felt nice to feel, I don't know, like I was in the world again. I love my college, but it's easy to feel like you're lost there sometimes. Or like the world is rushing on and leaving you behind. Maybe that's because I'm young. I think when I am old, I will like the feeling of being tucked away somewhere, untouched by the world as it goes faster and faster and faster, like the Tucks in Tuck Everlasting (a movie which, let me tell you, absolutely broke my thirteen-year-old heart the first time I saw it).

I looked at all the familiar road signs. The stretch of highway I'd seen before, my father's white beard and the driving glasses he's so proud of, the fast food restaurants in exactly the same location I'd left them. That ugly mustard-colored house that sits across the road from the complex we live in. The sight of my little dog in the headlights, because my mom was walking her to the mailboxes when we pulled up.

And then we got into my house and it was exactly the same but exactly different. The living room, so comfortably messy, as its been as long as I can remember. I went to my bedroom, and it was...empty. My nightstand was gone from my bed, and there were new fancy pillows on the sheets. I set down my laundry bag and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at my sister unhappily. "This feels wrong," I said to her. "This feels all wrong."

"It's the same old room," she said and settled right into her bed like she'd never left it for a second.

Today I saw friends. I went to my old high school, and saw how it had changed. I visited my old band teacher: this man was like a second father to me, I don't know that I would've survived high school without him. He sat at his desk and I told him not to judge me because I'd slept through my alarm and hadn't had the time to wash my hair that morning: he showed me pictures of his daughter, who is one now, and has teeth in her head and blue eyes like him. I hugged people, people I never used to hug. We were too familiar to hug, if that makes sense. But today, I hugged them all.

I watched my best friend step off a bus and walk toward a car, where his girlfriend and his best friends were waiting for him. His girlfriend couldn't contain herself, she flung the door open and climbed out of the backseat and toppled into his arms. It was really like those reunifications you think only happen in the movies. They were so happy to see each other. They stopped hugging and kissing finally and he gave me a big long hug. We never used to hug much, only one or two notable times in high school. It felt good, but strange.

"What's wrong?" he asked me when he pulled away.

"I didn't have time to wash my hair this morning," was all I could say.

We talked a bit, but it was freezing in the wind and every time he'd catch sight of Lindsey again, he'd grab her, pull her back to him, like he couldn't stand to be away from her another second.

We went to school then, and I saw my old best friend from forever. I don't really know what to call her now. Our relationship used to be too close and then too far, and then just confusing. We've had a lot of hurt and misunderstanding and that sort of thing between us: we've been through everything together, and I don't really know where that leaves us now. I don't know what to do with it now. It was good to see her, she didn't care that I hadn't showered. She hugged me and told me to save time for her before I left. I mean to.

I walked through the hallways of my old high school and remembered what it used to be like to go there. All the things that happened to me there. All the things that changed me there. I thanked God that I didn't have to go there anymore. It had changed, and I felt an intruder, but I didn't mind that. I don't want to be familiar there anymore.

Anyway. This is just a lot of recounting and I don't know exactly what the point is. I don't have much to say about it. I just, wanted to write it down I guess, maybe to figure out how I feel. I'm not sure. It's just all surreal. It's strange.

It's strange not to know where your home is anymore. I've lived in this little town in Massachusetts for my entire life. My family's never even moved houses, not once. Suddenly, I left, for three months, and moved to New York. And now I come back here and everything has changed. I miss being home. And by saying that I don't mean in Massachusetts and I don't mean in New York.

I guess, I mean, I miss that comfort. I miss being certain of my life, certain at all, of anything. I miss feeling like I knew where I was going. I miss feeling like I wasn't scared of where I'd end up. Growing up has many lovely aspects to it, that's for sure.

But I'm frightened too, I won't pretend.