And I Pointed My Dreams North

Packing sucks.

My room started out the summer looking rather like a storage closet, with everything I know piled up all over the place. Getting from the door to the bed or the closet quickly became impossible. I basically lived out of laundry hampers all summer, and never really gave a second thought to having to move back to school.

And here it is, the Friday before I go back, and piled all around me are boxes of clothes, sweatshirts for the Massachusetts winter, baskets filled with God only knows what, pens and pencils, computer stuff, instruments, a cat and a dog.

I wish they could come with me. Kitty has placed herself in the box for my desktop, and scrunched herself down so she is just peering over the edge and watching me type. She knows I'm going again, and she knows I'm probably going for a long time. It's hard to leave your best friends behind. Like most things in life, I wish they could comprehend how very much I love them.

Puppy is laying with her paws under her chin and looking up at me with her big brown eyes. She looks pretty pathetic, I'll admit. If I could find room for them in one of the bins and hide them away in my dorm, I so would. But they are happy here, where they are room to roam around, and all the treats and love an animal could ever dream of. They certainly aren't lacking for anything.

But it will be hard for them when I'm not here to go swimming on warm afternoons with Puppy, or lay in the sun with Kitty on my chest, or hold them both close when there is a storm. The three of us get along pretty swell. They grew up together in many ways. They're always growing up with me, and I was there to watch them grow up.

The madre and I will be happy to part ways for a while. She has her life and I have mine. When they intersect for too long a period of time, we tend to argue a lot. There are so many things about me that she doesn't know, and as I get older the things she doesn't know build and build, until eventually I feel as though we're strangers here. Strangers sharing a house, sharing a family, sharing a town and a little life we created. And yet, she is the person who understands me the best in the world. The silence between us isn't defeaning, it's a silence of understanding. We both know each other, but at the same time we understand that there are things about the other person that don't need to be discussed. The mystery in our relationship is good and healthy, for the time being.

I'm sure somewhere in her heart and in her mind she knows. She watched me grow up, she watched me struggle when being a tomboy wasn't okay anymore. She was there for every boyfriend, every failed relationship.

I remember driving in the car with her after I had recently broken up with some little boy. I think it was the seventh grade. I said to her "Mom, I don't think I can date one boy," and I tried desperately to articulate how I was feeling at the time. I always felt lost and confused, like all the girls were dating boys so I should do the same. No one ever even told me that how I was feeling was normal and okay, maybe it wasn't normal and okay. I had no idea that feeling the way I did was just the beginnings of trying to figure out who I was.

Being a kid is so hard. If everyone was just born a girl, or born a boy, and that was that everything would be so much simpler. But people aren't born that way. There is no ideal girl or ideal boy, and there never was. We're all different, whether it is due to nature or nurturing. Why can't people just accept us as we are?

Why couldn't someone just tell me it was okay? Why did I have to abandon who I was and who I would always be, and pretend to be someone I never was and never will be? Does society make us do this? Or do we put that pressure on ourselves?

I'm a firm believer that, at the end of the day, you and you alone are the only person in the entire world who matters. If you don't love yourself, no one can love you. How can we be expected to love ourselves if from every direction we are being told we are fundamentally wrong, we are being told that there is something wrong with us that we have no control over?

This is what I'm thinking about while I'm packing my clothes, my possessions, my memories, into boxes to be packed away in my car and hauled up to school.

It's hard to leave the ones you love behind, whether it's your dog or your cat, your mom, your friends, or the you you left behind so long ago. Some day we'll get there.