the beauty in the stuck.

i've been thinking good and hard lately about blogging.

about the start of this blog.

of when it began and why it began and all of the ands in between.

of how young i was and how sad i was.
of what it meant to be honest before i realized that words could be categorized as such: honest.
of what it was before any one read it, before any ex-boyfriend or future boyfriend or in-between-boyfriend could google my name and find all. of. it.

and if i reach really hard and really far into the cloudy and muggy memory of twenty-three, well...i think my thought then--or my impulse, rather--was to remember. to record. because i was so sure of change. because i knew things would change. and i'd want some sort of record of what had come before. and if i could see how i got from there to here, well then, it'd serve as a blueprint of sorts. for the future.

and at twenty-three it felt like the future was rushing towards me. a great-wave of everything to come. an ocean on the other side of a door.

the blog itself--the whole point of it--hinged upon the notion of change. that life would change. and i would change. and i within this life would thrive. eventually. even if it took time. even if it took failure upon failure upon absolute-fuck-up to get there.

and somewhere along the way, somewhere in the space of the last few years it started to feel as though nothing would change. ever.

and a feeling is a dangerously true thing. even when it's not.

and yes, yes, i know the one constant is change and i understand this on that intellectual level where information is processed.

but it feels like i'll be this age, at this job, riding the same train to the same station, forever. walking through a turnstile towards a position for which i am overeducated and overqualified and absolutely unable to leave because it pays. the. bills.

it was okay to be twenty-three and single and failing but fighting the good fight. it was okay to be twenty-three and writing about how most days i felt more like a disaster than anything else. and it was okay to be twenty-four and twenty-five and still all those things.

somehow though, it doesn't feel okay to be twenty-seven and in this place--stuck in this metaphorical rut. or, well, actual rut.

and so there's a little embarrassment. shame, even.

and it gets harder to write.

but then i think about writing and i think about the length of a story. and about how this one's just a little bit longer than others. and i wrap myself up in that notion and keep going. because you have to. you simply have to keep going.

you know, i still think about the A train. often, i do. about how much i hated it. about how dirty it was: the dim lighting, the putrid color of the seats. and i think about how all those years on the A train, made for my experience on the F. i love the F train. absolutely adore it. i forgive it for much and often. for when it gets stuck at York street, or Jay St-Metrotech. for how it sometimes inches between Bergen and Carroll.

it is not lost on me that i love the F so much precisely because i so deeply loathed the A.

when life begins to chug it will mean more for this period in which it seemed so very stuck.

change. good change. forward movement.

and when i finally meet the man i choose to spend my life with it will mean more for each and every suitcase i trudged home for christmas, alone. it will mean more for these ambiguous years in which i learned to do everything myself: installing the air conditioning and paying the bills and moving into a fourth-floor walk up without a man in sight. it will mean more for that one night when at two in the morning i had to crush the maggots beneath my bed, one by one.  more for the time when half-asleep i rose from bed to tether the roof's door to the stairwell with little more than yellow twine because the wind was banging into it in such a way i was sure the sky was falling.

it will all mean more for these years in which i got so good at maneuvering by myself that i began to wonder if i wasn't too far gone to make room for someone else.

change. it will come. like a thief in the night. taking and bringing both good and bad.

and i do want to remember. so i'm going to try a little bit harder to be that person who believes in the beauty of all that's yet to unfold. that person who sees the beauty in this time now. the beauty in the stuck and the shame and the trudge.