admittance: i miss st. louis

i always remembered the statement my brother made to me about this city, it made him a man, he grew up there. i figured i would have a similar experience because that is what college is all about. yeah, get the degree and all that but you really might wanna know who you are by the time you finish...so yeah good luck!

i didn't know how it was gonna happen. if it was going to be one big event or smaller ones strewn together but i could feel it as every time i came home i felt more like myself, with myself. standing on my own feet not on the backs of my siblings. i was living for me, being wholly selfish. well not wholly but pretty much and it was nice.

so now that i am looking back on college with the rose colored foggy haze of retrospective this is what i see: some friends gained for life, a stitched up heart, countless stories, lines of empty liquor bottles, wasteful decadence, fearless almost stubborn independence being fought for in all the most hilarious sometimes dangerous ways.

and st. louis was the backdrop to all of this change.

it will always be the place where i met some of the best people i have ever met, where i fell head over heels in love for the first time, where i had my heart broken and bruised, where i became an insomniac car-less careless impatient pedestrian who would walk miles rather than wait, where i would cry to relieve the stress, where i drank til i couldn't feel it anymore, where i could get lost in my music and my thoughts, where salvation was one door knock away.

i became the best and worst versions of myself there and i do not regret my journey to either side. my addictive personality and rampant curiosity would take me there naturally but st. louis gave me the environment i needed to finally flourish. to give in to all, well the majority, of my impulses and not feel ashamed. i finally had people that wouldn't look at me oddly for it...even if they didn't understand, they got it. my surrogate family, who shifted and changed over the four years, nestled me without touch with the belief that they would never expect me to be more or less than what i already was. i was already their sister, point blank.

do you know how freeing that is? that is the keys to the castle, that's giving curious george the keys to the city. i already had a family that would love me regardless but they already had the presumption of knowing who i was and what i was going to do, you know since they knew me from birth. but this family knew me from my eighteen year old realization of who i was. there was some discrepancy for sure but the essence was pure.

i was free to explore, to do damage, to push myself to highest and i do mean highest places as well as the lowest. it was scary in there some times. prime example, i remember vividly bursting into tears while trying to write an email, after receiving some good news, and had my then beau look completely astonished and worried at me. through all his questions, i still didn't really have an answer from where all this was coming from. it was like my body and my mind had subdivided so they could operate separately. odd situations like this would happen, frequently the more stressed i got. with all this subdivision popping up, the people who knew me best worried and i just tried to focus. i did have a degree to get after all.

so now, i feel like it was all worth it. i want to know everything about myself because it is the only thing in this world i can ever know completely. so i set my curiosity on myself, consistently pushing what i think i can and will do. what i'm capable of, what my real boundaries are and what ones had i adopted.

but this is difficult to maintain in the present. adulthood beckons in the most traditional sense and i have things i must do. and there must be a balance. there has to be a middle ground between wanting to be a housewife and a gypsy. because both are true to me. i am thinking i will live both lives before i die or at least that is the goal because i do get bored easily and what i figure is this: i always want to have that retrospect, no matter how hazy or foggy. i want to remember being fearless, i want to remember living and loving without regret no matter how much it hurt, i want to remember living for my instincts and impulses.

i want to remember that i lived not existed.

and right now, i can. all because of st. louis...but that was a chapter.