Last night I thought about all the places that have rotated in the background of my life for the better part of ten years. The venues I stood in, spilling beer on my own feet and dancing until the only thing that existed was a dark room and the people around me and the sweat dripping down my skin. The bars where I had one too many and the second I got home fell into bed. The places you only seem to go with certain people and then their memories twist together, impossible to separate.
These places are not the same, five, six, seven years on, and neither am I; sometimes I barely recognize myself, having shed the parts I can no longer hold onto. The bits and bobs trying to hold fast to the past. And the old me gets a little blurry at the edges.
I lost myself for a while in what I thought should have been, but I realized a long time ago there is no should have been only what is. There is choice and whatever comes after, and you learn to live with whatever comes after until it doesn’t make your skin prickle anymore.
In all of this nostalgia and growing and healing, the singular constant has been music. Old favorites I haven’t seemed to wear out yet and new discoveries I hand out to the people dear to me like little presents. And it feels a lot like giving away little pieces of myself trusting they’ll be cared for–but that is just life at the root of it all.
The rough bits have made me tender to a lot of things and I will keep entrusting little fragments of my own joy to the people I love. Whether we know it or not, we share little pieces of each other until whoever we are is made up of a lot of good things about the people we surround ourselves with and a lot of good things we simply are. You meet new people and sometimes it’s like they knew you all along.
I tend to ramble on like this often, spitting out whatever comes to mind even if it doesn’t fully make sense. It’s hard to come to grips with endings and change, but over the past few months I’ve found a happiness I haven’t had in a long time. I am surrounded by people who bring so much joy to my life I wish I could bottle it up and place it on my nightstand.
People who laugh with me about the mundane little things that aren’t funny to anyone else, people who make plans on a whim because something sounds fun, people who make me feel good to be exactly who I am.
How fucking cool is that?
The Rummy Writer 