Boston to LA, and back

And now it’s early Monday morning, heading back to Boston. The weekend is gone. The week is gone. The last sleepless night is gone. My body aches, tortured by my restlessness. The wheels of the car roll me forward. Forward towards…towards…?

I sit in the passenger seat as my beloved maneuvers the car – the car with me in it – forward towards the airport. Towards back to Boston. Towards back to my old stale reality. Towards away from LA, which before the reality of last week had represented hope and possibility.

(The economy sucks everywhere. Can’t just jump the fence and expect my reality to be different on the other side, apparently.)

I sit in the passenger seat letting myself be rolled forward and look out the window, down at the street below the wheels that turn ‘round and ‘round, rolling me forward. My head spins and my eyes burn from floods and floods of tears churned up over my mad crash into the wall of reality. Or was it my reality crashing into the wall of truth?

“Be sure to drink lots of water when you get back to Boston,” my beloved instructs, as I pour myself a glass of juice before leaving. “Why?” I ask. “Because you lost a lot of water this week with all your seas of tears.”

“I was retaining water anyway,” I say, spilling more.

My eyes burn and my head spins but the whirring of my brain is finally petering out from sheer exhaustion. I’ve stopped tugging at all the knotted threads, but I’m still pondering the sage words of the stranger on the train: “Man spends his life trying to create truths to fit his reality, only to find that his reality no longer fits his truths.” Searching for solid truths in a too maleable reality. Watching the white pebbles in the black asphalt as the car rolls down the street…

Solid is the tarmac beneath the car: [Truth.]

Made up of black tar and small white pebbles: [Truth.]

Turning the corner my eyes staring out the window find themselves resting on a dingy blue car parked on the side of the road. Old, a little rusty, otherwise nondescript, but it becomes knitted into my thoughts.

That old blue car will still be parked there on the side of the road even after we turn the corner and I can no longer see it.

[Truth.]

This becomes a game in my head. Make an observation – truth or reality?

The breeze coming in through the open window is lovely and cool and soft on my face – the sort of breeze one associates with spring:

[Reality.]

We’re on the freeway now. The sky to the left of us is streaked with pink.

[Truth.]

“Look at the sunrise,” I say. “Isn’t it nice being up with the sunrise for a change?”

[Reality.]

It’s going to suck going back to cold Boston…

[Reality.]

…Those slippery, icy sidewalks and short winter days.

[Truth.]

I shut my eyes and lean my head against the window. I can still hear thoughts and sentences and a line from a song I heard the other day flitting through my head, but I must have dozed off. When my eyes blink back open I see airplanes on my right. “Oh!” My chest tightens and my eyes burn again. Filling up, blink, flush, rolling down my cheek again.

Korean Air…Midwest Express… The car rolls on. No no no no no…. [Reality].

“United, right?”

“Yes.” Blink, flush, roll. Wipe.

Sigh.

Delta…US Airways…more US Airways…

The car will keep rolling forward, and when United finally appears it will stop. And I will get out, hoist my bag onto my shoulder, and my feet will proceed to move me forward. Forward I will move. To the ticket counter, through security, to the gate, onto the plane. The plane will fly me forward. Forward towards Boston. Forward towards…towards…?

Life will continue to move me forward. That old blue car may still be sitting parked on the side of the road, but life is in constant motion. Whatever I decide, or don’t decide, whatever I do or don’t do, happily or not…I will at least continue to move forward. This much I can believe in…

[Truth.]

the kindness of strangers

Looking over my shoulder to see what I’m reading, the gray-bearded man beside me asks how I’m liking The Winter of Our Discontent. This isn’t my first time reading it, I tell him. I read it in the 7th grade, but for some reason it recently came back to me as a book I should perhaps read again.

“What about Tolstoy?” he asks, somewhat randomly; “Nietzsche?” Followed by a query of my education, my travels, and then something to the effect of Youth Being Wasted On the Young.

“Yes,” I sigh. “I am aware of that. And I’m afraid I’m rather tragically wasting my youth on simply trying to find a job.”

(It’s been a particularly bad week. I’m wearing my black suit, on my way to an interview that I’m feeling less than optimistic about).

“Life is a job,” he says.

“Maybe so,” I reply, “but it doesn’t seem to pay very well.”

“Of course it does!” he says with a chuckle. “You just have figure out how to stay well.” He pauses. “And I don’t mean physically.”

The train slows at the station and I search the map above the door to figure out where I am, how many more stops till mine. I’m in LA, in strange and foreign territory. Strangers don’t talk to you on the subway in Boston.

“But by the time you’ve finally figured that out,” I answer, “you’re no longer young, are you?”

“Well, there’s certainly some truth to that…” he pauses. Then adds, quoting someone I haven’t heard of: “Man spends his life trying to create truths to fit his reality, only to find that his reality no longer fits his truths.”

I have to think about this for a moment. My mind feels water-logged. Truth…reality…reality, truth, fit…I stare at the bright white ceiling and say the sentence to myself again to try to make sense of it. “Spends her life trying to create truths to fit her reality…but reality doesn’t fit her truths…”

The train slows again. I look out the window and see 7th &. Metro Center. “This is me,” I say.

“Good luck, kid” he says as I get up.

I smile inside to have been called “kid.” Like maybe it’s okay that I haven’t got my life under control yet. Like maybe the fact that I can’t seem to figure out how things work in this world is just because I’m young, and not that I’m a complete loser. Here I’d been thinking that because I turned 29 two days ago and still haven’t gotten myself a Real Job there certainly must be something wrong with me. But no, it’s okay…I’m still just a Kid.

I proceed to bomb my interview. Or at least that’s how it feels. I walk down the street contemplating the absurdity of feeling like shit when the sun is shining and the sky is blue and in any other reality it would be just a perfect day. I’m searching for truth, and reality at the same time.

Which comes first, the truth or reality?

winds of change

The New Year brings with it winds of change. Not always, but this year it does in force. I feel them blowing at me from all directions – blowing me forward, backward, pushing me in no clear direction, indicating only that I must move from the spot I’ve been standing in.

It’s been two years now since I moved to Boston from New Zealand, sealing off one era and beginning another. In my mind those two years have been marked by my struggles to get a foothold in a career, to resist inertia, to maintain a positive attitude, to carve out a home for myself and grow some roots, and to find contentment in the current moment, whatever it might be. I developed the mantra: life doesn’t begin ‘when…,’ day after day reminding myself that it would be a mistake to assume that happiness would come to me when I found a job, found love, made a lot of money, bought a house, whatever… Failure, I told myself, was letting misery set in, and this, above all else, was what I had to strive against.

I started off with fierce optimism, but gradually it became harder and harder to pick myself up each day and find either contentment in the moment or hope in the future. Until finally, a couple months ago, I began to recognize that my approach was no longer working. Despite my attempts at optimism, misery and despair had set in, and rather than finding contentment in the moment, I was simply stubbornly denying the fact that I was pretty unhappy.

But the last two years haven’t been a complete bust. I haven’t found that career “foothold” exactly, but I have gained some useful experience, both intangible and “on paper.” And I’ve learned a lot about finding contentment in the moment, and in myself; where this begins and ends, and what I need and don’t need to be happy. And, somewhat unexpectedly, I also found love. Though that too came packaged with adversity, as that love took a job in Los Angeles a few months ago.

And here is the crossroads, because my current employment has now come to an end, thereby removing what little security I had and freeing me up to move in new directions. I have the choice of either scrambling once again to find work here in Boston, or going to Los Angeles. Either I continue on the path I set out upon two years ago, persevering in establishing a “life” for myself in my chosen city; or I embark upon a new path into the unknown, one that will lead me into a new era marked by companionship and re-learning how to trust, and the sacrifice of autonomy for the comforts of love and emotional stability.

In my mind I make a list of the merits and drawbacks of staying versus going. In this list, staying in Boston racks up far more points – there is a lot that I like about Boston, and there is little that appeals to me about Southern California. And yet, in my gut I sense that this is not the correct answer, that none of my concrete reasons for staying in Boston are what the current crossroads are about. Even as my brain nervously tries to come to a rational and well-thought decision, I think I know the answer.

My spirit is flagging. So many things I love about Boston, and yet I’m not happy. I know that Los Angeles will not make me happy either, but the invigoration that comes with risk and change possibly will. If I stay in Boston, I can predict how I will pass the days and months immediately ahead of me: I will continue to struggle in my job search, I will have my friends, I will have my weekend walks and my cafés, and I will continue to play the “waiting game,” as I maintain a long-distance relationship in hopes that it will eventually cease to be long-distance. If I go to LA, the future is unknown.

I think this is what I need right now.