People Are the Catalyst, Always

n Which I Have Another Stupid Existential Crisis:



I do this sometimes, and can only conclude that it must be a product of several deplorable personality flaws.

I do not like to wait. And I do not like not knowing.
Sure, in some cases waiting is fine. As in: I have been waiting far too long for this delicious pizza to arrive. I had to wait to see what was making the terrifying noise around the corner. I've been waiting a long time for this.

I tend to NOT be fine with waiting to accomplish something, whether that be getting the laundry done, or, in this case, disappearing for an extended period of time. There's something very unsettling about it, a feeling of tenterhooks and hospital waiting rooms, the kind of feeling you used to have as a child while waiting for Christmas morning: full-on nausea coupled with exhiliration. Perhaps it lies in needing to know that you are capable of doing what you've dreamt about doing.

I've wanted to go to Ireland since middle school. Someplace with castles, and rolling hills, and where one can get lost in a rich history of literature and war and agriculture. (It's not that those things do not exist in the US, as I'm sure there will be plenty of debate over the merits of culture in North America.) I need, in an almost-desperate way, to be where no one knows me.

I was talking about this with wolfs_rahne the other day. It seems that, eventually, if you've lived somewhere long enough, and usually, when you've had jobs in that place that entail face-to-face customer service, you end up with an obscenely entangled social web. Lots of people know who you are. Many of those people might think that they know you. On occasion, you've dated, or had drinks with, or passed in the grocery store, various and sundry members of that web. And ultimately, people who DON'T know you, or know you only fleetingly, or even, sometimes, people whom you consider friends, begin to define you by pulling on their end of some strand of that web and scrutinizing what it's connected to. You become definable only through your relationships to other people. It becomes impossible to move freely. Something's always pulling you back, like one of those absurd games on Japanese TV: a giant bungee cord strapped to you, mentally and emotionally, that denies you the ability to fly under the radar, to move about psychically, to no longer feel that you're obligated to apologize for something you said at the bar the other night, or for kissing someone you didn't realize you shouldn't have, or to explain what you were doing hanging out with John Smith.

I have a massive case of insatiable independence. I need, with an inexplicable strength, to get out. To move around in the world. To become immersed in a place that I don't know, that doesn't know me, that I must learn to love and navigate and engage in and barter with. I love Alaska, don't get me wrong. It will always be home; I'll always come back. But I need to become like the expatriates: Pound, Hemingway, Stein. To go somewhere foreign and somehow blend in.

Part of this I blame, without his knowledge, on Travis, who's brilliant and bright and seems to be able to move about in the world as he pleases. Where do people get the money for this, by the way? I realized the other day, in the full and unwarranted throes of giddily preparing for him to return to Anchorage, that for whatever odd reason, I was projecting this sense of anticipation onto him. I barely know him. He surfed my couch for one measly night, this boy-poet who's a cross of Dylan, Kerouac and Joyce, and left just as quickly, and yet, for all his transience, I had somehow decided that he'd be coming back to me. He's not mine.

I dwell on things that I know won't linger because I am stationary.

Yet another reason to disappear from here. I feel like I lack accomplishment because of people like Travis. Were you to measure 'accomplishment' as amount of time spent slaving over term papers, or over some job, or in sheer workload, I'd have them all beat. But I haven't accomplished WHAT I WANT for myself, and he has. I dislike, in a huge way, meeting people who make me feel small, or less intelligent than I am, or what have you, and Travis, through no fault of his own, is capable of that, because I am stationary. Because I have stopped doing things for myself, stopped dreaming and started focusing sheerly on the struggle to maintain a daily existance. I haven't thought outside the box of employment, bills, and obligations for months.

Maybe I'm exaggerating this. Maybe I really am, at the core of it, just as desperate to find a soul mate and turn into some horrible Plain White T's song as everyone else. But I don't think so. When I reach out for something, in my own head, it's always a scene of travel, of philanthropy, of ultimately returning to India and eschewing completely everything that's tied me to my own life for so long. I have to give something back, whether it be to literature and writing, or to the profundity of that cosmic overflow that results from experiencing the human experience fully, or to the place I was born, that needs love and aid so badly. I cannot be stuck like this, sitting at a desk all day, just getting by.

There's a Yogic saying..."God dwells within you, as you." I want to open up and let it out.