I like to think of most things as experiments of the human condition.

What I mean by that, is everything I go through, I milk the living hell of. For this, a friend once called me a “personal growth junkie”.

When I think of when such an affliction started, oddly enough, is it a swing that comes to mind.

HABITS OF CHILDHOOD

There was, and still is, a hammock suspended between two Crepe myrtle trees in the front yard of my childhood home and I spent the great majority of my early years quite literally cocooned inside of it. My neighbors used to joke that seeing me there, swinging between the trees with my head in the clouds, was an expected, daily sighting. I got to know them quite well by nature of always being outside, an experience that in hindsight, is probably why to this day I am much better at conversing with older people than those who are actually my age.

Anyway. That hammock was home base. I would come home from school, grab my journal, and run right to it. Taking breaks to walk the neighborhood or skate, it was where I would return, again and again, to process the events of my life.

I was, as I remain, addicted to processing. More often than not, as it would happen when coming of age, that processing revolved around grief. When I think of it now, I am still just sitting right there, in the sunken California light, watching my toes dangle over my mother’s rose patch, feeling an intense sensation of loss for which I have no name. It is a sensation that will consume the course of the next decade, but I don’t know this yet. I don’t know anything yet. The last drop of sun has just drained from the horizon and I am thinking. Always thinking, my mother would say, craning her head of the window as she called me in for dinner.

As the records of my journals show, those thoughts varied.

FEASTING ON EMOTIONS

They were about dolls, about how strange and aching my sudden indifference towards them felt when it came. They were about wanting to grow up while fearing what I knew I would leave behind. They were about fragile friendships and first periods, cute boys and the war zone that adolescence turned out to be. They were about what it felt like to be ten, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen. My own, personal records of existence that make me cringe with embarrassment and cry with heartache for the sweet horror that was growing up. But more than anything, they are evidence that I had an early inclination for overthinking.

When I would hear people say they didn’t want to think about something, or had a habit of running away from their thoughts, I realized that I perhaps had the opposite issue. I ran right into mine, hungry and curious, begging them to tell me absolutely everything, even if it meant, as it often did, that I would come out the other side a little jaded, a little less innocent.

I loved the way it felt to feel. The deeper I waded into adolescence, the more expansive the buffet table of human emotions became. I wanted to try a little bit of everything. Joy, sadness, jealousy, infatuation, betrayal, grief. I pushed them around on my plate like peas, feeling that there was something vital to each that I didn’t want to miss out on. Others I reached for with such eagerness that I was left burned, never having been told to wear gloves when handling heartbreak. Someone really should have put up a sign. I would have been a great reader. Whether it would have saved me, whether it would save anyone, I am less than sure. My bare skin still wears those scars. They are like lessons, etched into my skin.

Heartbreak was the whole feast and I gorged myself until they dragged me out of there, prose frothing at the corners of my mouth, showing all signs of an overdose of emotion. I didn’t care. Some people abstain from feelings. I indulge. Perhaps neither are recommended, but we make our choices.

MULTIFACETED EXPERIENCES

The point I meant to make a few hundred words ago is, I am going through something here, in New York, that feels like a feast in it’s own right. And in loving the sensation of wading through such a multifaceted experience, I am nostalgically remembering my childhood, and how much of it was spent doing something of the same.

In college, I would long for home, but I never saw the other side of it. I would simply return home for the afternoon or weekend, feeling somewhat guilty and ashamed for not sticking it out like I felt one was supposed to do. I knew that there was something to be gained from moving far from what you knew that I was simply not privy to.

The longing for home I feel now is not quite the same. It is not so intense. It also, oddly enough, is not really about actually wanting to go home, as much as it seems to be about grieving a part of my life that home represents. I seem to have slipped into full adulthood, and while I don’t think I was ever particularly very good at being a child, it is strange nonetheless to have severed myself from that era. Which, really, is a bit more haunting than being homesick, for it is not a place one can ever return. Not that you could honestly pay me to, but you get the idea.

Anyway, finally far from home, I am remembering that curiosity I always felt for whatever lived on the other side of that longing. The one I was so sure my collegiate peers were unraveling the profound mysteries of right before my eyes as I ducked home for another Sunday dinner. Four years and three thousand miles from back then, I can tell you this now.

I can tell you that longing for home is often a blanket that drapes itself over me the moment I wake, only to slip off my shoulders as I step into the kitchen and begin to make coffee. I can tell you that it might blow in through an open window when the temperature is almost Californian, but that it dissipates by noon when I am running to catch a train. I can tell you that it is, if only for one second, rich with such a severity that I think there is no other side. But then I step into New York. I look at the historical architecture, the street art, the trees. I stare at the world that somehow magnetized me all the way to it from that hammock in Southern California to this street in Brooklyn, and I feel such a stupidly warm glow in my chest that I realize that that is it.That is the other side.

I think everything might be on it.

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