This is a little post to say that I'm back in Vermont, and the grand adventure is over. I haven't precessed all of it yet, so until a later, yet-to-be-determined date, this will be the closing of this blog. I owe it to myself to wrap it up with some sort of reflective post, but I'm not quite ready yet.

I'M COMING HOME IN 10 DAYS!!

I just counted the days from I was last home to when I will be home again, just for kicks, and it came out to exactly 300. It's kind of poetic, but it's way too long, too long. I love my family so, so much. I only realize this having been away so long. I have friends there that make my life incredible. And the sun shines there making it all warmer. I'm making serious efforts not to turn this into a eulogy for my time in Scotland- it's not time for that yet. I have a week and a half left. I have finished my work- with the exception of a short blurb I have to write- and my best good friend here is leaving on Saturday. I'm not sure what I'll be doing for the next week and a half, and it kind of freaks me out. I've devised a strategy tho- pretend I'm on vacation:

Do not stress out about anything.
Do not say to yourself "you should be doing something".
Do not obsess on things to come.
Make sure to take a walk outside every day.
Don't forget to pack, but don't pack before this weekend.

Oh Riverside, we have such a love hate relationship, but I am eagerly awaiting touch down in your seasonless, grimy arms.

I get to move around again today. I'm going down to London this afternoon. Seeing a familiar face is perhaps even better than going somewhere. This morning has been good. I thought I was getting sick, but took some Airborne, some Lemsip (as disgusting as it was), and some vitamin C last night and woke up feeling good. I had a good session with my counselor where we talked about how I actually feel good. And my mommy sent me a really good email. It's good to feel good.

Twelve and Holding is an incredible movie. I remember once when I was 18, in San Francisco visiting a friend and we went to see Igby Goes Down. He had been going through some things with his family, and the movie really hit him- hit him in a way that he was vacant when we left the theater. Going to the bus stop, he walked yards ahead of me and had nothing to say. And later made him tell me he never wanted to see me again. It all turned out fine in the end, but that movie must have been a little too real to go on ignoring whatever was bothering him.

My reaction to Twelve and Holding wasn't quite as explosive on the outside, but it taped on a lot of things inside. The story was thick with childhood traumas, and 12 yearolds trying to cope with their lives in ways that seem far beyond appropriate for their age. The specifics didn't matter so much as just seeing kids struggle in ways that I remember struggling. Most people don't remember their childhoods as a series of dramatic events- at least they don't express it- but I do. Remembering my life feels like a film. Like a fabricated story. I want to write it down.

This won't be long. It's 3 am and I have to document this feeling. I was feeling really really alone today, and I saw a little of how I do it to myself. I am always thinking about transitioning, and choosing to come out here first gave me the space I needed to get myself together, but now that a couple of months have gone by since I opened my mouth about it, I'm wishing I was with those who hold my history and are so much of my present. I almost spent loads of money to come home a week early. I don't care about how I connect or share things with people here as much as I care about everyone else. But "one is silver and the other's gold", I guess. I am really overwhelmed with the support I've gotten from so many people at home. Every home. I'm also feeling so much closer to them, and to everything. I want to let everything be seen. The spacer between me and everything else fell out and I feel alive. And I feel happy to be alive. I'm writing this now because I know I will have a few more rough patches, things will sometimes be tough, but I have to recognize for myself that I sometimes feel this way.

I'm not sure why seeing that it is November now hit me so hard this morning. My sense of time has become completely relative to what phase my life is in. Because I think so fondly back to last Spring, it seems like I've been programmed to think everything is happening in April. I think it is April now. But it gets dark at 4 in the afternoon and it's freezing outside. I wish I didn't feels so detached from the season, though I'm relieved I've even noticed I've been living like this because it's a sign that I'm getting back to normal. I've been living for some other time and this is where it's gotten me. Sometimes your vision's fucked up, sometimes it's not I guess.

The Gossip proved to be one of the best nights I've had in a long time. I forgot that I knew that band well back in the day. With the first few chords of the first song they played I saw in my head a distinct moment about three or four years ago when I was driving on the 215 freeway from my apartment in Colton into Riverside listening to some song of theirs. I was going to work, or to see mom, or to hang out somewhere. The picture is of me driving past the contractor's licensing school or the trailer store or the biker bar along the freeway on LaCadena. Remembering this made me partially relieved that I hadn't abandoned all recollection of that hugely influential part of my life. I was living with Nickolas- the love of my life. I made my first home with him and I still miss it. We came home to eachother- me lying on his bed while he translated songs and learned Spanish. The mangey cat I started to feed on the porch against his wishes. The livingroom we never sat in. My piles of stuff on the dining room table that bugged him. The guy who thought we moved out so he took my plant without asking. (We couldn't understand anything he said, so maybe not asking made it easier). How Nickolas let me park in the covered parking and he parked on the street. He had the truck then, and he got the car then too. We did The Fish when we needed to. I never did it willingly, he always made me and I felt better after. I was in love with someone then that didn't love me, and I was broken down a lot, but he balanced it out so I could get better. I can only hope to have been half as good to him as he was to me. Now he's in love with a beautiful man, and I have been off someplace else for quite sometime. It's no wonder my mind is in other places all of the time when I have things like that in places I am never in.

The other part of my mind went to the part where I was thick in unrequited love. I thought about how strange it was that that actually happened. Now, I can't think of reasons why I loved her. I don't think I knew what love was anyway, but I thought I felt it. I was 18 when it started and 20 when it was over. I stuck around for a couple of years hoping to figure it out, but I really just figured out that trying so hard was making me feel like shit about everything and feel small and silent. My ideas of what should have been happening were completely impossible and my ideas of who I was and should have been were so far off from what I actually wanted. I thought I had no choice. It blows my mind how much I suffocated myself and let other people in my life to help me do it. People change a lot and I feel like I can't even recognize what I was at 18. Wherever gratitude should go, I'm thankful to it for having moved away from all of that. And Nickolas is still my baby, and it makes me teary to think of him and think of how we're gauges for the passing of time in eachother's lives. He's seen all there's been to see in me since we were frustrated teenagers and all I have to do is talk to him if I wonder where I've been or where I'm going.

It's Halloween. I'm going to see the Gossip tonight at this venue that was at one time a church. I'm pretty stoked. Liz and I are going. She's wonderful. Although we've only met here, she kind of feels like home.

Home is a big thing for me right now. I keep revisiting the thought that I want to know what home is. I saw a woman walking her dog the other day and it made me a little weepy. She was only walking and he was just sniffing along, but, to me, that represented a life with consistency, simple tasks, fulfilling life maintanence. I know that I have to be at home within myself before a place will ever feel right. I suspect that beginning to feel more at home in my skin and body is leading me to crave a home for my body, too. I have always craved the ability to keep going some place else, wrapped up in the possibility of somewhere else, and eager to start over and re-establish. But now that is making me feel weary. My life happens in three-month cycles (as many other Benningtonians can understand), which keeps me in the process of settling in and then just after getting ready to depart. Both of those adjustments take a while, at least a month, so very rarely do I get the chance to just be in a place without thinking of what came before or what's next. My mother asked me about a year ago, jokingly, if living the life that Bennington prescribes will make me finally feel like I could stay in one place for a while. I laughed it off, doubting that would ever happen, but now it seems she guessed it before me.

I don't know where home is for me. Riverside isn't it. I've been away so long that each time I go back, the city and I recognize each other less and less though it seems we understand each other more and more. Like my relationships with my parents, geographic distance seems to make it better. And the folks I know there I still adore, but sometimes I see the language barrier that emerged from the joining of time and distance. In preparing to go back, I see myself more as a visitor than I have in the past. I booked my trip for just three weeks. That's the shortest it's ever been. I want just a small chunk of time to enjoy being there and leave before my feelings of being stuck in the wrong place creep in an make me sour. Time to see mom and go for Monte Cristos at Millies and go for a movie that she will get annoyed when I can't sit through it, time to chill out at Dad's and have the two of us follow each other around and go for lunch and me watch him dig in the cactus garden (that is if the wife doesn't hate me an make me feel unwelcome), and time to spend with Nickolas and quench the hurt in my heart I have from having to talk just on the phone once a month and see for myself the love he and Uly have. And watch a couple of others in their lives that have relocated since I last checked in or that are on their way somewhere else. I want time for all of these things, and then I want time to go back to my life and live it some more. I can't stay too long in a place that used to be home but isn't anymore without eventually feeling stuck.

After that, I will be back in Bennington. When I think of a quiet home, I think of that place. The sense of home we cultivated this summer still sits with me, and returning in winter before the term starts I suspect I will get the quietude I'm looking for. It won't be Shingle, but Rachel will be there and that'll give me a lot. Also, working in the office is familiar, and I hope I keep my endurance up and enjoy it. The summer was filled with impatience and anticipation, but I'm looking to make the winter last as long as possible and take lots of time to saturate myself with the home I have there before everyone comes back. My car will be out in Vermont with me this time which I think will change my feeling about being there quite a lot. I will have the freedom to move around and feel like I live there. I'm really looking forward to that.

So that's the high flouted big life stuff, the little things are that I'm going to London in two weeks to see Mollie-o. I'm glad to be getting out of Glasgow for a bit, to be seeing her, and to be going to the Tate. I'm taking forever to get work done, but I guess that's okay. It's not like I'm in the same place with all of my familiar resources, so of course I'm gonna operate differently. I just thought for a while that I should be a little further along. I was worried about it, but now I'm just fighting off the apathy and trying to keep into it. On a shallow note, I did the Glasgow shopping circuit this weekend, gave myself a fresh look and I don't feel so frumpy, which is nice. I'm passing all over the place here and it makes me really happy and relaxed and excited all at the same time-- all these things and I've made it so that it's not a secret with my housemates, which also feels good. Now I just want to start T so that this high voice I have will kick itself down a notch. That part make me a little insecure in public. But that will come in due time, in due time.

I do believe that's enough for now. I love you folks. More people have told me they actually read this than I thought. I'm glad for that, because I can think of it as actually writing to someone instead of off into oblivion.