Change
I’ve never been skilled at change. Notice my word choice — skilled. For “normal” people, is changing a skill? Or is it a natural innate thing; a piece of humanity that I was born without? After all, change is built into our biological clocks. Every day, we get a little older, and every year, the Earth does too, with its changing of the seasons. Right now, we merge from the days of sandy toes and sun that seeps through to your core, to the snow-piled winters, where somehow my body, even in its constant state of tension and agitation, is warmer than the air itself.
I’ve spent the last two or so months sorely attempting to adapt to my college surroundings. I grew up about twenty-minutes east of campus, and I purposefully stayed close to home — something that I know would disappoint my younger self. She ached, not only to leave her town, but to go as far away from it as possible. I think I had convinced myself that I wasn’t the problem, I wasn’t the reason I was so lonely, so unfulfilled, and so glued to that classic state of eighth-grade depression — it was the city. It was Pittsburgh, and its steel mills, and its dirty rivers, and its stupid little black-and-gold towels that angry men wave around in the air — no matter if our sports teams lose or win.
High school was also a hard change for me — I went to three different schools in a four-year time-span. Finally, I settled on a place where I managed to find a handful of good friends. Friendship is part of what makes change so hard. At the risk of sounding cliche, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. But sometimes the needles will poke you until your hands are speckled red. Or, your slippery fingers will drop them into the abyss, never to be seen again.
By my senior year, I finally became semi-confident in myself. I grew out of my hatred for my hometown. I decided to stop resenting my parents, and my mom became one of my best friends. I adopted a cat named Houdini, who I love more than life itself. I was comfortable, by most definitions of the term. But it was time to venture off again to a brand-new start. Never did I ever think I’d be nostalgic for rubbing my hands together in a cold gym, or for wasting time in study halls. But, here I am, exhausted with reinventing myself.
Some nights, when I lay in my Tower A dorm room, I stare at the ceiling and a wave of melancholy washes over me, like I’m laying in a shallow sea. The sand is prickling at my spine, and the tide is growing lower, and lower, and lower. When I’m feeling brave, I’ll try to close-read this feeling like it’s an assignment. At its core, it’s a feeling of lost time and what-ifs. I want my lips to be stained with freshly-picked strawberries. I want to drink hot cocoa on a snowy day. I want to cook peanut butter fudge with my Grandma. I even want to re-play the taunts of my bullies, because this time, I’ll know what to do.
I worry that Pittsburgh is a curse, or some sort of never-ending time loop.
But for as many wants of the past, I have wants of the future. I want to live in another state someday. One with mountains and lots of trees, like Oregon or Washington. I want to study abroad in London just for the sake of saying I did it.
I have a backstory and a load of possibilities, both just out of reach. I am not fond of this middle, limbo space. Why can’t I view myself as an individual instead of an extension of a city or a family? And is it really a curse to have a home that it hurts to leave?
For my own sanity, I hope those answers come soon. I don’t know where I belong, but I do know that everything is a process. At one point, I was born, and I’m sure that infant-Wendy wasn’t a big fan of things like light or sound. But now those things are at my core. One day, maybe I won’t just be a part of a family, or a Pittsburgh-native — I’ll be a tree in Oregon, a big book with complicated words, or a little grain of sand on a big beach. Or, dare I say, a past and a future consecutively: both knowing pain, and strife, but also the joy that can come after disaster.