you win again, dorothy gale

I try to remember what exactly it was that made life so exciting when I was nineteen but it never quite comes to me. There are a lot of stories, you know. There would be nights that were nothing but wet feet dragging through murky soil and conversations that puddled much quicker than they blossomed. One incident would always happen, though. One wrong word turned into the night's scandal that everyone was talking about the next day, as though if only you had been there you too could have experienced such excitement. It was a lot of couch time. A lot of drinking, snorting, pill-popping, and all that goes along with the first years of coping as a college rockstar living on your own.

Except I wasn't living on my own, nor was I enrolled in college. What I remember most was being holed up in my room, writing for hours and hours and days at a time. I go through these phases every now and then where I have to remember everything. This is how it begins, but immediately is turned into completely different stories with new settings and the narrator is no longer me but instead an unimaginative character with bland traits that nobody notices. I hate eccentric characters, or at least my own. There is no need to make every single heroine the handsome wallflower that dresses in quirky outfits and makes pottery and poetry and sings songs and has parents with a criminal background. Or whatever. It reminds me too much of the Babysitter's Club or any girl's first attempt at writing, both of which have no chance in being exempt from the most boring literature in the world category. So I would practice.

When I was twelve I went through this rageful fit of not being good enough and completely demolished everything I had ever written, including these long, drawn-out novels that always made me ill to look back on. I wish I had them now. I would read them and say look at me, look how cute I was, look at what an impressive and smart and edgy middle schooler I turned out to be. Look how obvious it was that I was reading Mary Higgins Clark and watching Lifetime and had yet to be pulled into a world of pretentious libraries and namedropping Kurt Vonnegut every five conversations.

I refused to write much after seventh grade. Even at twelve, I hated being thought of as the writer in the family or a girl who thought she was a writer or just the idea that anyone could consider themselves a writer. Like it should be capitalized, like it's some godly idea that had never been thought of before. What do you do? Oh, I'm a Writer. So when I actually decided to try again, just to see if I could do it, if I had any inkling of smarts left in me, it was top secret.

My social life seemed so overheated. Every night was a new party with a new expectation to arrive, to be witty and obnoxious and just as lively as the night before. Maybe it wasn't even really all that pressuring, maybe I just made it all up in my head and no one cared whether I spoke or not. It felt that way, though.

It sounds dramatic, I know. A teenager with nothing better to do than invent social anxiety issues and make the biggest something over the smallest nothing. I knew those girls too, the ones that would broadcast their deepest darkest secrets of why they really do bite their nails, how it had to do with their fathers and the story goes on for hours. I just didn't feel like explaining myself to anyone.

Time begins to melt and sleeping patterns are now just an idea because a few short stories later it's dawn but you can't be quite sure as to which dawn it is exactly. Didn't you have somewhere to be? your mother will ask. Oh, I thought it was Tuesday. It's Friday but you were actually talking about three Tuesdays ago. People who aren't real replace those leaving all the unchecked voicemails as the images being created are no longer from sheer collections of human observation the way they used to be, but instead have come from somewhere far beyond that. And as totally gay as it sounds, all you want to do is continue exploring it.

Where have you been? What have you been doing? Do you have a new secret society of friends? These questions will bolt at you, or sometimes only seep inward with syrupy movements, but they come and they repeat and the lack of answers happens over and over again because half the time you can't be bothered to get up and go to the bathroom let alone put the phone back on its proper hook. Your mother will insist on buying you a cellphone and you are convinced it's the end of your soul.

Maybe what made nineteen so exciting was how the rocking and the rolling began to spread out, when it was no longer a series of chain events that blurred in their motionless jaunt. Once working past the abundance of voices wanting to know of whereabouts and ongoings and future appearances, it had become its own sort of comfort.

I don't think moving back home will be like it was when I was nineteen, but the comfort that I found there was something I was never able to bring with me anywhere else. You win again, Dorothy Gale.