we were driving along the highway & my mother jerked her chin upwards and said, i see you like that go bus.
how flattering, i said, to be compared to a bus.
she said, i think you just got in the driver’s seat of the bus. i think you got tired of being a passenger & you climbed into the driver’s seat & look what you’re doing now.
i’m trying to work out what it means to have a sustainable happiness. what it means to, in the little garden in your head, grow a bunch of flowers that aren’t affected by who wants you or who leaves you but by who you are & want to be. which is easier said than done, i think, but better than feeling like your entire life has been ravaged because the codependent relationships that you poured all the water & expensive plant food into have disintegrated in your hands.
i digress.
the garden being self-motivated & determined isn’t to imply that other people can’t have profound impacts on it or that it’s more valuable to keep people out of your life altogether because of the destruction they could wreak. i always want to have an open heart, i’m just tired of being unable to get out of bed on sundays because of what a boy told me six months ago. relevant to the denomination of six months is the caption for the instagram story i posted at the end of june: and i stayed in bed for like six months, but no more! i’d started going to the gym four times a week instead of whinging about being dragged along on wednesdays.
no one can convince you that you deserve to live a life that isn’t defined & controlled by suffering. not even the best-intentioned people, who turn enemies when you take a little longer to heal than they’d banked on. you are the only person who can sit up, look in the mirror, & say: i am actually going to have a really great day today. & the way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives, so…
i’ll be the first to admit i’m a little jaded. i’m holding people at arm’s length; terrified that i’ll roll the dice with someone & come up wanting again. first i wrote a bit scared and then i wrote afraid and then i admitted terrified, because even if the recovery period is shorter i’m not sure i can go through the triple threat heartbreak i experienced in november & january & march again. i don’t want to feel like i’ve wasted four years again, but i don’t want to be closed off from the world forever—what is the point of a beautiful garden you never show anyone? so the question is: how do you go from being so griefstruck that you’re just a ghost haunting a life you were supposed to live in to, well, a person who is living that life?
& the answer is: slowly.
i don’t claim to know the answers, i claim to write them down. there is something that will make your life a little better about lifting heavy weights & committing to eating three meals a day & growing your nails out long & drinking water & saying good morning! to the bus driver even if you didn’t sleep for as long as you would have liked to. it saves my life a little. there is a time when i would have died for anyone to offer me a moment of genuine tenderness. i wanted it so much that i went scraping the artificial substitute off so many people who didn’t deserve to be hurt by me, feeling worse & worse for every ill-gotten i care about you. now i offer it to strangers. now i hold the door for the next person & i give my seat on the subway to people who need it more than i do & i try.
hope has feathers, sure, but it also has tar stains & bruises & bite marks & once it took a trip down through the sewers, but you have to keep picking it up. dust it off & put it back on the shelf, because i tried living without hope for a while and it was a simulacrum of living if it was living at all. it was a crummy way to exist, & that’s why i keep writing all these defences against it happening again.
i want sorrow to be a vein i can tap into to write, not the house i live in.
my supervisor says to me, you seem very well-adjusted. she says, you’re having the best summer ever. i want to push back against this. i want to say, don’t you know i laid in bed for all of may & thought about how it might be better if i dissolved into the bed, if i were never here at all? don’t you know that after a year of being clean i fell back into my worst habit? don’t you know i said i was going to go to montreal & then i didn’t & i said i was going to be in love with him forever and i left him in the cold because i’d been using him as a placeholder since the day i met him and couldn’t bear to explain? & then i think, summer started on june 20th, & that was around the time i said to myself, hey, i want to get better.
so i agree.
may is not summer, and no matter how straight on you think you’re looking at the world when you’re seventeen, you always seem to have your head tilted slightly. & the pattern repeats at eighteen, & if i were a betting woman i’d tell you nineteen is more of the same. & you can get upset at yourself for being young & having a skewed perspective & thinking everything that happens to you is the Most Important Thing That Can Happen To Anyone Ever, or you can accept that you’re young & stupid & Figuring It Out.
i don’t think i have it figured out now. i’m certainly not going to claim to you that this is the best time of my life, because it’s merely the best time of my year thus far. and i’m not going to claim to you that i’ve learned & repented & healed from everything i did wrong in the first half, because not only would that not be true, it wouldn’t be fair to the person in the process of healing and changing their ways. plus, i’m sure i have more spectacular screw-ups on the way, sure i have some heartbreaks incoming that will make the recent triple threat look like child’s play. but i’m not as scared of that as i was when i started writing this article. & i would rather have my heart broken a million more times than never experience profound & serious love again.
for the first time though, i do feel like i’m changing. like i did, in fact, decide that i was tired of getting driven around & having other people be the only flowers in my garden & idolizing habits that it turned out to be pretty easy to implement.
i’m young, sure, but i feel like a dog that just got taught a bunch of new tricks. namely: things happen for a reason, even tragedies, things happen for a reason, even when they go poorly, & there is no mistake you can make, no matter how profound, that you cannot come back from. you are the driver. you are the person who decides what comes of your life.
i won’t let mine be a tragedy.
it is flattering to be compared to a go bus, & other important takeaways:
if love comes along again, i’ll be ready.