Jun 11, 2018
June is an enchanting month where I can count four stars from my patio and I question everything about my life. In the dark, quiet hours that are slightly cool and birds chirp past midnight, I take scale, my choices weighing heavier, wondering if I will experience all the things I've dreamed of at a pace which feels deceptively slow, like I'm floating in the hopefulness of a coming-of-age flick without the drama of younger years when I noticed the weather only to pick tank tops and denim skirts over jeans. I want to forget any marker of age, so I can't measure myself unfairly by a number. The number tells me I'm too late, I've procrastinated too much. But even the feeling is misleading. I felt the same way when I was 19, leaning over the railing of a balcony in Spain, catching the moonlit glimmer of ocean past the castle on the mountain. I felt I didn't deserve the majesty of it all, because . . .
And now I sip the night air, relishing a makeshift Bohemia I've created on my patio, with two stacked twin mattresses and upside-down pots dotted with candles and smoothed sandstones from years of spontaneous desert hikes. The orange neon glare of a streetlamp and thick power lines sever the sky - influences that push the stars away. I feel the same sting of teenage angst as cars whiz by and I'm afraid that who I am simply isn't good enough. What could I make to be extraordinary enough? To make my life grander than an apartment on Las Vegas Boulevard. Are the words enough? Is my raw, unschooled talent the makings of a bigger life? I fail at ignoring the sharp, impatient commands of my neighbor discouraging her puppy from playing, to "go poopoo" and get back inside. I yearn for a life not overlapping in depressing proximity.
I can remember times all along the way where I felt alone in the anti-climax of accomplishment. Where I put stock in markers I thought would mean I had "arrived." But the real movement happened in the moments of unacknowledged contentment, that couldn't be measured by the external world. Couldn't be seen by anyone outside of me. And June, would remain, a month to come alive at night and remember all the lonely moments that connected me to something greater, that mystified the very meaning of life itself.