I am sitting here, in my little room avoiding homework by scrolling through Instagram. This room is much different than the room I was in over the summer, and it is far different than the room I was in the previous year.
I scroll through Instagram to see pictures of people I know -- or knew, or kind of still know. They are smiling and happy with some old faces and new ones. Lovers bones may have vanished, while others magically reappeared. Fleshy smiles replace mine in candid’s on the wall and for a minute, I ache at how disconnected I feel from my life, or my past life. How did everything change so suddenly? Why do I feel like a guest in my own body my own life?
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I think back, freshman year of college who was I that year; and how many different people I have been since then. Three years seems worlds away. I am the same Identical woman, but my wires have been disconnected and connected. I look at the bodies around me. The warm souls that fill their void, there are some new, some old and there are some who have faded. And I see this, on this screen that keeps us connected. But, I don’t feel connected at all, because they too have shed the skin they wore for a year. They have grown and so have I. Old friends who no longer say hello, stare at their toes shuffling front to back as they walk by. High school teachers and peers that don’t even recognize me. They look me up in down in awe that woman I have become standing before them, is the same awkward duckling they used to quack at, they can’t even find words to speak.
I have had so many fresh hello’s and salty goodbyes and I sit and wonder why? There is no good reason for it, except that the world spins and we can’t stop its perpetual orbit. So we spin with it until we get dizzy and the world blurs around us. When we gain composure again; when the world centers back into focus everything has changed. I sit and I sigh and I look at everything around me, my room, my home, my friends, school. This isn’t exactly where I want to be, I’m still a stretch from the finish line but, it is where I am right now. In a year I will do the same thing and everything around me will be different.
I don’t know where I will be sleeping at night, or where I will live, what job I might have. I can’t see who will be by my side or who will walk away. Like everyone else, my future is hidden by a murky fog, I can’t help but attempt to tell the future, or worry about the people who may walk out. Why am I, this mass of atoms here? My daily routine strives to answer that question. And I feel uncertain, that what I do is for no one but myself, in attempts to answer that question. I could just be killing time and waiting for the last grain in my hour glass to fall through, I don’t know.
It’s hard fighting the urge to answer the unknown, but I look around me at all the variables in my life that make my happy and enjoy them because they may be subtracted a year from now. These are the thoughts running through my brain at this very moment and I write them down to remember; the people I have been.
"People change, feelings fade, things go wrong, memories remain but life goes on." -- Unknown
