Around 365 days ago I wanted to be a ghost.
I wanted to turn into mist. To leave the small dirt encased town I had been merely surviving in and putting up with for so long and disappear to a big, nameless, anonymous city so I too could become nameless and anonymous.
I wanted to slip out of people's consciousness and stop existing in the present tense. I violently needed to abandon everyone and everything, because I felt like I had already been abandoned. I only needed geography to catch up to me.
When the time came I packed my small, retched life into big boxes and left. For good, I said. It was a grey day when I spit on the place that had so many times spit on me and took off without any apologies or goodbyes or explanations or reasons. As I watched that shack of a house, my prison, disappear behind me, the relief of being gone forever washed over me, but didn't mask the resent I still had deep inside.
But even the best laid plans do not always work, and I did not entirely become the shadow that I thought I so desperately wanted to be.
And I'm kind of happy about that.
I'm happy because it's exhausting to hate an entire place. So instead, over the course of 365 days, my hate boiled down to just one individual.
I'm happy because I figured out that growing up doesn't always mean blowing away. And even if it does, there's always a train back to where you started.
I'm happy because instead of feeling chained by my past, I feel reassured. There's something peaceful about knowing that everything that has happened can not be undone, for better or worse.
I'm happy because the people I still talk to and see from back home are my friends, so it is easy to forgive. I'm happy because despite my slight departure from life, we are still friends. And we are young, which is something I've missed feeling. I've missed singing at the top of my lungs and sticking my head out of sun roofs and remembering old times and dancing terribly and laughing too hard and living with the people who have shaped me the most.
So yes, I am happy. Which, in the end, is what I actually wanted. I just didn't know how to get there.
