teclo

There are things on this planet that I will never understand. There are people on this planet whom I would consider friends that I will never understand. Most importantly, there are things that I do and say that I will never understand.

What makes a young woman say the things that I do? Why, sometimes, do I find myself scrounging at the smallest task of decency and decorum and throwing it out the window. I pretend that I know so much about so many things, and really I know nothing. Or, in fact, do I know much more than I allow myself to let on?

My friend E said of me before I asked her to be my bridesmaid, "I would choose [you] as a bridesmaid, because while it is good for friends to make you insane, it is always good to have a friend around who makes you sane." This is, most likely, the highest compliment I have ever received. She had told me earlier, upon her move away from Cowtown to Chicago, that (in speaking with a mutual college friend of ours) I help make people's lives better.

And I sit here and wonder how that could possibly be true. And yet I hear it from people: "Undone is an intent listener;" "Undone gives wonderful advice; " "Undone knows more than you will ever understand;" "Undone understands you better than you understand yourself." When I hear these things pass through people's lips and head out there, into the air, I find myself looking around for an exit; terrified I'll be found out.

How can I make people sane when I can barely hold my own happiness in the palm of my hand? How can I understand people when I can barely understand myself? How can I give good advice when most of what I think about are clothes, shoes, and how much I weigh? I don't understand how I can be, as one person said, "a truly enlightened indvidual" when I am still searching for a calling.

Perhaps this is the fate of the 'Net Generation. Perhaps we carry around those qualities left to us by our Generation X peers: the confusion, wonder, and insecurity that come along with being a twenty-something ever. While my mother was married off at twenty-two and at my age, I was her child, I am spending my twenty-seventh year getting engaged and trying to figure my life out.

I have poured my life out of it's box, and I am searching through the puzzle pieces to figure out how the language major goes with the photographer goes with the radio professional goes with the knitter. How the yoga enthusiast goes with the pizza eating gamer goes with the shoe obsessed buyer goes with the liberal advocate. I am picking up these pieces that don't seem to fit together, and I find a consciousness in there somewhere. Some sort of direction that I am supposed to have. My life has taken so many twists and turns and curve balls.

This year for Undone and Boy have been incredibly difficult. What with my six-month battle with critical depression, to the car accident, to the unsureness about both of our employment situations, to the dibilitating credit card bills, fall-outs with parents, and finding ourselves. The shining moment of the entire year was the evening in the art museum of November fourth.

And perhaps that moment will be the one thing that the both of us remember about 2004: the shining moment will, eventually, out shine everything else that clouded our fifth year together, my seventh year in this life.

But, as for now, as I am alone on the first floor of our aparement, my hat for my sister being finally half-done, and my head still pouring over the crises of new-shoes vs food and holiday trips home vs time spent with my love. I will figure this out, and if it happens to be on the day of my last breath, it will be a sigh of "This" before I descend into black.