Los Angeles

‘you can still turn back. you can still drive somewhere else. you can still go back to d.c.,’ I thought as the grapevine came into view just one-hundred and some odd miles outside of LA.

I am finally here, but yet still so far away from being anywhere. Without a job and without a permanent place to stay, I still feel like a traveling salesman, selling my idea of who I am and who I hope to be to all who ask what it is I’m doing.

I tell them, they listen, and they invariably tell me they are proud of me, they think I am doing a good thing, a great thing, that no matter what I will come out a better person for having tried, for having moved all the way back across the country for a dream. A dream. Maybe more an idea than a dream, a thought of what I would like to be someday, five or ten years down the road.

This transition from DC to wherever I am now has not been easy. To be honest, most of it has not been fun. The whole time feeling like a constant battle between being in the moment and thinking about the past and the future, the latter usually winning convincingly. My nieces and nephews clamoring around me, tugging and pulling and smiling and jumping, the oldest at the age where she is beginning to notice things outside herself. A girl at school doesn’t like her, and therefore doesn’t want to play with her, a huge deal in a little girl’s brain. I want to be there. See them all grow up and become real humans. But I can’t sacrifice my deisres for them, can I? No. There is something else I have to do, I should do, or more simply that I want to do.

In Sacramento I felt the world pulling at me. Things from the past not able to be kept as the past anymore. It seemed God, or the world, or my inner-concious, or maybe a combination of all three, thought it was time for some closure on things that may be left in my way. They all bubbled to the surface brilliantly, horrificly, but definitely not coincidentally. Just another part of transitions. You can’t really move on to the next thing until everything from before has been dealt with. What a shame. It’s so much easier to ignore the past.

Los Angeles. The next five years. Holy shit.

Sometimes you have to make some changes to see if you really are the person you think are. This is my attempt.

~ by kevinthomas on January 10, 2008.