In another life

In another life I woke up in the mornings and found myself lying in a bunk bed, enveloped by purple sheets and closed in by a Naked Green Man and Charlie the Elephante. In another life I looked out my window into the long street leading away from Marzell, and in springtime watched the cows munch on their grass and in wintertime watched the snow fall from the heavens. In another life I sometimes woke up at midnight, convinced that my roommate was sitting at her desk, painting away like there's no tomorrow.

In another life I got on a bus every day and rode down a mountain to school, and came back eight hours later to a dorm full of girls. The lights in the dining room were yellow instead of white and the most we could fit at our table was thirty, not over a thousand. There was almost always someone sitting at a piano, playing the soundtrack to our movie, and there were other girls curled up on a couch, snuggling and giggling and sharing secrets about their day (and whispering and making up nicknames for cute boys), becoming more like sisters every day. And just like sisters sometimes we fought--sometimes the peace of the morning was interrupted by yelling, sometimes there was a direct line between two people, a line spelling out clearly "tension"--and we always made up in the end and were closer than ever.

In another life every night of the weekend nine or ten girls piled into a small room and gathered around a TV and watched movies and swooned over Lucas Till or argued over whether or not Justin Bieber deserves Selena Gomez. Sometimes we went into the kitchen and turned Rihanna on really loud and danced like madwomen, and others we chose to listen to Ingrid Michaelson and sway pensively, dreaming about the future. And when people celebrated their birthdays we dragged them outside and threw water on them and ran screaming from them when they tried to give us a hug.

In another life there was a day when all the staff members left and the Seniors were in charge and we ran all over town and had a water fight. There was a day when we all locked ourselves up in the TV room and sprayed hairspray and put on make-up and watched Disney movies until when we walked out we had been transformed from simple girls into beauties fit for a Banquet. There was a weekend when we traipsed up to Switzerland and danced and screamed "Body Body!" and "Party in a Swiss Chalet" and fried bacon for an hour. There were long walks in the woods to visit Karcia, sledding trips down the hill and Hieber's picnics in Malsburg. There were countless other times when we lived together and laughed together and grew together and loved life together.

In this life sometimes I forget that life. Sometimes I look at it and all I see are the fights, the days of sickness, the boring weekends when everyone was off on some trip or another. Sometimes all I remember is being stressed out because of school; I forget all the girls who distracted me from it when I needed a break. I only remember that I had to clean the bathrooms every day, and not that I got to do it with Ami. I remember only that the winter was bitterly cold, not that I had precious friends to snuggle under a blanket with. I remember that the nights were dark but forget that they were also filled with beautiful stars under which we sat on blankets and shared dreams about our future husbands.

In this life sometimes I go days without thinking of that life. And then there are days when I wake up and look out the window and instead of seeing the streets of Marzell I see the Asbury campus. And instead of seeing Angela I see Rebeca. And I eat my meals under white lights in a room with a thousand other people. My small group is made up of people from TAG and iTAG, not the Witty Home Babes. And most days I see that this is good, but there are other days when I want to go back to bed and keep dreaming. I want to dream that I am sitting on one of those yellow couches, the ones that used to sit next to the aquarium before all the fish died, and all around me are my Blauen Babes. I want to dream that we are sitting under blankets sharing prayer requests and praises, and that outside, though we can't see it because the sun has gone down, the snow is falling and maybe, just maybe, we'll go out and carol in a few minutes. I want to dream that I am back in that life and that this life is still just a hope for the future.

I want to dream all this, but I know that it can't be true because that life is gone. That life lives on only in my memories now, and when I think this I feel the urge to cry. But then I realize that that is good, too. That life was good, and this life will also be good, and someday, in yet another life, I'll look back on both of them and shed a tear because I want to dream that I am back in one of them. That life is gone. But I have the pictures and I have the John Mayer and Ingrid Michaelson songs running through my head as a soundtrack to the memories. Maybe someday I'll go back to that place, and walk through the dorm, and in each room I'll remember something beautiful or tragic that happened. And instead of shedding a tear because it's over, I'll smile because it happened.

In this life, I sometimes smile because I remember that you were in that life.

twentytwelve: something greener?

the thing about twentyeleven is that it was a year of major change. more than that: it was the year that i bid my childhood good-bye and embarked on the train to adulthood, and responsibility. it was the year that i said good-bye to high school and hello to college. and the thing about going off to college is that it means your life is going to change. completely. i mean, you go from living in your parents' (or your dorm parents', for you other boarding school kids) home to a dorm room. you go from being dependent on your parents for everything, from your meals to your clothes to your rides to school, to having to decide for yourself where to eat and what to spend your money on. and of course there's the whole matter of go-to-college-become-instantly-poor that's affecting every financial decision you make. the summer between your senior year of high school and your freshman year of college is your last chance to be a kid. it's the last time you'll be able to just be carefree with life; after that, you're in charge, you have to make the decisions: you're an adult.

so i think it's safe to say that for those of us who graduated high school in twentyeleven it became a year of change. there's no way to get around the fact that last year was one in which everything changed. and it's also safe to say that most people don't like change. oh, we might like to sit around at home and dream of a time, maybe ten or fifteen years down the road, when everything will be different. we like to close our eyes and picture ourselves at age thirty, wildly successful in our highly lucrative career, with an adoring husband (wife if you happen to be a boy) who lives to serve us, and two or three adorable children who are perfect angels. or maybe you're the starving artist type, who pictures yourself living in some drafty garret somewhere lost in the middle of new york or london or paris, plying your craft and living on stale crackers and lofty dreams. either way, we all like to imagine what life will be like when it all changes. but when it actually comes down to the nitty gritty of change, it kind of sucks. it's much less glamorous and much more...tiresome. it has less to do with success being handed to you on a silver platter than it does with hard work and slowly improving until you reach the point you've dreamed of. (we all just wish we could skip the work and jump ahead to when we're "thirty, flirty, and thriving"). but it doesn't work that way. someday we wake up and realize that we'll never reach that point unless we go through the slow process of change, and it's more like being skinned alive than it is ripping off a band-aid.
all this to say, twentyeleven, for me at least, was the year that the slow process of being skinned alive began. and i will be the first to sit in my room and tell myself how much i like change and how i can't wait to be "all grown up." i'll also be the first to run screaming back to bed at my first glimpse of what growing up really looks like.

that said, it doesn't seem like i should be holding onto twentyeleven at all, does it? i should have been leaping forward into twentytwelve, screaming "hallelujah, the year of the torturous beginnings of change is behind me, let's move forward into the glorious new dawn of beauty!", all while sprinkling daisies behind me, possibly into a field of shining green grass underneath a sky as blue as the sea, accompanied by the sweet sweet trilling of birds. and yet, oddly enough, that's not what happened. instead i found myself clinging to the tree at the edge of the meadow, the one with "2011" carved into it, holding on for dear life while the great winds of change pulled at me and sought to toss me unceremoniously into twentytwelve. needless to say, the winds succeeded in tearing me away from twentyeleven, so here i sit, firmly planted at the beginning of twentytwelve. and you see, the reason i didn't want to leave twentyeleven is because, while the latter part of it was a year of change, the beginning still held the last shreds of my childhood. and as soon as i dipped my first toe into the waters of almost-adulthood, i realized two things: that i was undeniably excited about growing up and having a future, and that i was irrevocably tied to my childhood and terrified of leaving it behind. confusing, right?

so while i should be looking forward to twentytwelve with great hopefulness to the future, i'm still looking back at twentyeleven and twentyten and all the years before that, years that are filled with pictures of my childhood. because this year, i'm  not just growing up. i'm not just stepping into the world of adulthood, i'm actually leaving my childhood behind, in another country. almost all of my memories and lessons are housed in that other country, and i have to leave it and walk into another one. and that scares me so much that i'm tempted to turn and jump into bed and hold on for dear life and swear i'll never leave. but i can't really do that, now can i? i have to be mature and grow up, because while my past is in that country, my future, for the moment, lies somewhere else, and how will i ever meet it if i don't step forward now and grasp it?

they say the grass is always greener on the other side. i don't think that's the problem, though. i think the problem is just that we can't be on both sides at once. the grass isn't greener on either side; it's just a different shade, and we want both shades because they're both good, but we're only allowed to have one at once. and that, my friends, is why i think we hate change so much, and why i am so reluctant to blaze forward into twentytwelve. but then i know that i'll never get anything accomplished if i keep looking backward. i have to move forward, eyes on the horizon, and every once in a while i can glance back at where i've come from, just to make sure i'm still going in a straight line.