Monday, March 23, 2009

Windows

So last night the wind almost broke my bedroom room window. Johnno and I were cuddled up in bed after a long, and in someways hectic lazy weekend, when we were awoken by a loud bang. Too tired to even try and figure things out, we just shifted back into our little ball of slumber and comfort. It wasn't until the early morning when I finally looked out into the park, expecting to see a broken tree or fence.

Instead what I saw was the swinging of a satellite dish from off of the roof of the building, hanging inches away from my window. An inch to the right and the dish probably would have slammed through my window and led to Lord knows what. I stared at it, wondering what to do since it still hung by a cable over the door into the building. I knew I should talk to my neighbors, the managers, but was a bit off due to sleepiness from escorting both Johnno and Lola out into the morning.

I spent my time doing what I do during my unemployment; facebook and realtystaff, ecards and emails, before preparing to workout. I was about to sign off when I saw a random eamil in my facebook. I wasn't sure who it was from mostly due to my many FB games and figured it might be someone asking for an add or a question about something gamewise. I wasn't prepared for what came next.

As I read and reread the email I was confused by the familarity of the message since the name didn't ring any bells. It took several minutes before I realized that it was someone from my past who had managed to track me down in the most odd of ways, someone who I never thought I would ever hear from again.

It was the babysitter from my childhood, the woman who had been watching my younger brother Jason Ryan, the woman would had been taking care of him when he died as a baby. I was pushed into shock by her attempt to reconnect; she mentioned that she read my blog and was reaching due to what she felt was her part in 'the truths and tears' of my life that camne out of those past events. to say I was shocked would not do justice to the word or to myself.

For all of my openness in my words, my interactions and in my relationships, there is still a part of me that is seperate from my day to day. I talk from time to time here about my family--my parents bad divorce, my awkwardness with my childhood and my attempts to try and use my past as a way to push myself to be a better person. But at the end of the day, my past sits on the edge of my persona, waiting for its cue to take the stage and do its own little dance of self awareness to the acts of my lfie that I have put to rest.

I slowly stepped away from my computer, from my work out, from my plans for the evening and insted managed to find myself wandering the streets of Studio City. Somehow I ended up with a pack of smokes (something i have cut back on outside of one day a week) a lemonade (to mix with some vodka like I did in high school) and some beef jerky (because 711 always makes me feel like I need something more than smokes so they don't judge my bad habits.)

I eventually found myself sitting on the steps out side of my building, near where the dish hung from my rooftop, on the verge of vomiting and fainting and crying and loneliness. I tried to figure who to call, who could be a comfort, or would be the person to snap me out of my thoughts. Except my thought were in a million places all at once; not just in the past that I keep to myself, the years pre Emerson and my friends, the years pre Los Angeles and the boyfriend, the life pre Rory in some ways. I debated calling my mother but thought of it because I didn't know what I wanted or could ask from her--that it was selfish to drag her back into thinking of Jason Ryan and those years that we have all moved so far beyond.

So often I look at my life as though it is a million littel windows--facets of how I see myself and the world around me. Sometimes it is about my career that pays the bills, sometimes it is about all my hopes and plans for the boy, other times it is a view of my friendships and where they stand and other times it is about my art and creativity. The little slivers of existence that give me hope, give me ambition, give me pause.

I wonder if I am the only one who does that--looks at life in such a segmented way. I imagine we all do this in our own way; that we choose to see things, events, people and ideas in their own sepearte ways because it is too much sometimes to look at the whole. That if we saw the full picture then we might wonder what it all means and get caught up in just the comtemplation of everything. Or maybe we do this to keep things from being too much--that if we saw everything cleary at once we just might never know where to go next because if we're honest we know that each view touches but is so different that they almost don't make sense.

So I find myself looking out the most diffcut window--the fragile one, the one that is almost shattered, the one that even an inch difference could be broken. and I'm not sure what to do with what I see. Maybe I'm not supposed to do anything at all but know that the view is there. To know how fragile and simple and easily broken it all can be.

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