A Summer of Discontent

“Are you happy with who you are, right now?”

This is what I asked of my friend, anticipating the question to be reciprocated to me. I heard his answer. I heard his reasons why he was. I knew what my answer was, and I knew that it was true.

No.

The cliché is that you go abroad for a while, find yourself and come back a changed person. What no one ever warns you about is that when you come home, yes, you are some changed version of yourself, but you don’t know how to make sense of it. That’s where I am. A series of mild epiphanies and small truths abroad has culminated with an unnerving fact: I know I’m no longer who I once was, and I’m not sure who it is I’m looking at in the mirror any more.

When I left everything in my life was tangible and punctuated by the very present knowledge that my life- the people I loved and the person I was- had already been established. I loved my school. I loved my friends. I loved my now ex-girlfriend. I was going to go to Spain, have a semester of fun and discovery. I would come back with some stories to tell but everything would still be here waiting for me. I’m here now. My school is here now. My friends are here now. My ex is here now (to some degree), but the man that got on that plane 5 months ago isn’t here now. I was going to come back and graduate. She and I were going to work through the distance for a semester, she would graduate and move here to be with me until I graduated, and my life would grow from there. Instead I’m stumbling through a haze of questions and the only certain answer that I can come up with is that I’m not friendly with any aspect of who I am or what I’m doing.

I saw my life through a microscope. My future was present enough for me to rearrange it with a flick of a wrist or a twist of my fingers. She was the one. They were my best men. My life was at hand and it was just a matter of time before I put everything into place.

The things that were close to me then are now seen through a telescope that I’m looking through backwards. All the staples that were immovable and convenient are now so far away that I can only recognize them, no less manipulate them at my whims. Even worse than being apart from the things I once cared about and loved is the fact that I am inescapably aware of the distance. I’m freefalling and am completely sentient of it happening with resounding fear that I forgot my parachute. No cigarette, or drink, or joint, or night of laughter can rescue me from the fact that I know that I’m at the epicenter of my own confusion. The certainty of my being lost is rivaled only by my own awareness of being lost.

I’ve seen sunrises and the bottom of bottles, talked to my sages and reflected again and again. My only conclusion is this is just something I’m going to have to deal with. The answers aren’t out there, no matter how much I want someone to drop a road map on me. I wanted to come home, I wanted to reconnect. I wanted my life back. Trouble is, my roots are foreign. I cannot find my own feet in a world of obscure familiarity.

The issue isn’t that I don’t feel at home here, rather that I don’t feel at home anywhere. I know for certain that if I went back to Spain I wouldn’t be happier than I would be here or back in Colorado, or California, or any other place you can throw a dart at. I can’t blame her or them or America for not being what I want them to be. I can’t figure out what I want any of them to be. I want to be home again but I don’t know where to start looking for it. I want to stand firmly on something I can believe in. Goals like graduating and seeing my friends and being in love are as comforting as an addressed envelope without a letter inside.

I’m standing at the apex of loneliness and confusion but I can’t decide where to aim my first steps away from it. The best I can do is keep getting up in the morning and filling the hours until something rings true to me again. I’ve always struggled with the question “where are you from?” but this is the first time that I’ve ever felt homeless. I once couldn’t wait for my future to start. If I could have hit a fast forward button to get me to my marriage with her and the life I had so precisely planned I would have. I’m still looking for fast forward, just to get me out of being stuck. Truth is, the best I can do for now is just get out of bed. And that’s not much of a consolation.