My mind has been elsewhere recently, and everything practical has suffered.
I can’t concentrate, I can’t see a goal into next week, I keep thinking about swimming, and before that, sliding my shoes off on this dangerously staple-strewn carpet and doing a cartwheel in the hall outside of the creative director’s office. In a dress.
I’m no stranger to inappropriate behavior in the workplace, but this is getting ridiculous. I’m laughing all the time and my boss is starting to look at me sideways. Worker bees are not supposed to be hysterically giggling at their monitors, because that means either they aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing, or they find Excel really interesting. Both are frowned upon.
I think I’ll go home for a little bit. Being there after a few days always makes me want to reach out, grow up, act right. I always have that one minute where I am slightly panicked by closure, of moving back to the dreaded suburbs, my brother and me punching each other in the ribs, all the holidays we’ve ruined.
I want to stay up all night watching Saved by the Bell and draw and freak out the cats with the reflection of my dad’s watch. Dig through the boxes in the attic and marvel at how our family looked when I was too young to even care and dodge weeding responsibilities and test drive my playlist on winding roads. Remember my childhood dog, Zydeco, who slept with me every night until I left her for boarding school and without me she breathed last, a painful end to her neurological disorder, only to be buried in the back yard of a house we no longer own.
All those summers where we ate dinner together almost every night, the month I worked at the organic vegetable stand, the several I bussed tables while the chefs cooked up green butter, me being walked home at two in the morning from the field parties, when Shannon and I would go to the playground and smoke cigarettes even though we didn’t like them, the things the Hanson brothers would bring back from Bread and Puppet, the time my dad almost let me go.
And then the day I realized I could never go back, long after when I was a high school sophomore and he was a senior and I felt lucky to be chosen, and then the Monday night I was back from college, and he was there again, coming to our house, delivering a pizza, wearing the same baseball hat, saying how much I had grown, and asking me did I want to leave with him, go back to his mother’s basement and do something I wish I had never heard him ask.
I can’t exactly go back to being a kid, or even fifteen. But that has never really stopped me from trying…
I can’t concentrate, I can’t see a goal into next week, I keep thinking about swimming, and before that, sliding my shoes off on this dangerously staple-strewn carpet and doing a cartwheel in the hall outside of the creative director’s office. In a dress.
I’m no stranger to inappropriate behavior in the workplace, but this is getting ridiculous. I’m laughing all the time and my boss is starting to look at me sideways. Worker bees are not supposed to be hysterically giggling at their monitors, because that means either they aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing, or they find Excel really interesting. Both are frowned upon.
I think I’ll go home for a little bit. Being there after a few days always makes me want to reach out, grow up, act right. I always have that one minute where I am slightly panicked by closure, of moving back to the dreaded suburbs, my brother and me punching each other in the ribs, all the holidays we’ve ruined.
I want to stay up all night watching Saved by the Bell and draw and freak out the cats with the reflection of my dad’s watch. Dig through the boxes in the attic and marvel at how our family looked when I was too young to even care and dodge weeding responsibilities and test drive my playlist on winding roads. Remember my childhood dog, Zydeco, who slept with me every night until I left her for boarding school and without me she breathed last, a painful end to her neurological disorder, only to be buried in the back yard of a house we no longer own.
All those summers where we ate dinner together almost every night, the month I worked at the organic vegetable stand, the several I bussed tables while the chefs cooked up green butter, me being walked home at two in the morning from the field parties, when Shannon and I would go to the playground and smoke cigarettes even though we didn’t like them, the things the Hanson brothers would bring back from Bread and Puppet, the time my dad almost let me go.
And then the day I realized I could never go back, long after when I was a high school sophomore and he was a senior and I felt lucky to be chosen, and then the Monday night I was back from college, and he was there again, coming to our house, delivering a pizza, wearing the same baseball hat, saying how much I had grown, and asking me did I want to leave with him, go back to his mother’s basement and do something I wish I had never heard him ask.
I can’t exactly go back to being a kid, or even fifteen. But that has never really stopped me from trying…
9 comments:
this is beautiful and very sad.
You don't want to go back to being 15. You just want to see the world through those eyes. It becomes impossible, though, once you've seen through the eyes of a 25 year old (or in my case, a 35 year old, and more).
Warning! Green butter can cause seizures.
Getting older is great. Embrace it. You couldn't pay me to be in my teens or 20s again. 30s rock.
I miss not working and my biggest worry was if so and so liked me back...haha.
I'm 24 and still like to crinkle my straw wrappers, drip water onto them, and watch them "come alive"
...this tends to get stares.
i really like this. it's not nostalgic, but something else entirely. :)
tag!
that made me laugh, then (almost) cry (I'm a sucker for sad dog stories) then laugh again. thanks for the beautiful post!
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