What Now?

I’ve been back in the states for almost exactly two months now. 

I haven’t written anything mostly because of a failure on my part to associate what’s happening to me now with reality. Vermont is the same. It’s hard to believe that it never changes. Being back here is like being stuck in a capsule that never dissolves, a planet which simply drags you right back into its orbit. 

Much of my writing has probably been about Vermont, at least peripherally. There’s a point to which all hometowns haunt us–your most formative moments, strewn about in places you have to revisit over and over again can’t be an uncomplicated experience. But there is something in the air, in the water here. 

It’s time I stop running from it, and learn to write about it. 

This place is beautiful. It’s indubitably so. The sunsets are long and spectacular, the night skies are clear, the woods are green and warm. Life explodes from every corner, heat settles on the meadows, and yet still a breeze snakes through the trees. I used to feel a sense of violence in the way that I didn’t feel I belonged. I used to feel that it was a rejection, not to find some kind of place in this beauty. Now, all I really feel is a beleaguered acceptance of it. This place is beautiful, and it hurts me. Both things can be true. 

You come back to your childhood room, and the furniture is the same, but the people in the pictures on the wall are different. You come back to a previous life, and that is different too. 

A year has passed, maybe less. The tectonic plates of my body have shifted. They no longer fit where they used to, don’t slide past the daily tasks and trivialities with the same ease. 

I’ve written a lot about how strange it is to be a young adult, but this is one of the strangest parts. To have the umbilical cord of the home town still attached to you. To experience the feeling of free air, and be yanked back suddenly into a space you no longer fit. 

I have a hard time going places, because I’m worried I’ll see someone I know. Maybe it’s a feature of small communities, but somewhere along the way you become a stranger to people you used to see every single day. That the people that complete you will be the ones who stick around.

I go for walks and see scenery so beautiful that I cannot believe it is real, right in front of me. That I get to reach out and touch it. I do a meditation that’s helped me a lot lately; I know that I am breathing in, I know that I am breathing out. I want to learn to forgive things more easily, to not hang onto the harm. I am learning to do this with Vermont too, to let go of all the hurt and live easily in each moment that passes. To forgive myself for knowing that I am going to leave, someday for good. 

Maybe it was necessary to be away for so long. To plunge myself into something completely different, to experience the cold shock before moving to more temperate waters. To become something in a completely different space and to return knowing something important, but not being able to identify what it is yet. 

I am planning for a future that’s almost here. Speaking in practical terms, I am going to continue the blog for as long as you all will have me. Thank you for seeing this specific journey to its end, though I promise there will be more adventures to write/review soon.