I’m sitting outside, alone at a coffee shop. My drink of choice is Strawberry Creme. It’s not as romantic as you see in the movies, but then that’s probably contingent upon disposition. There’s a group of women, one who carted along her toddler, sitting on the other side of the patio from me. The boy is equal parts adventurous and whiny, but the latter is probably because he’s being restricted by the societal restraints his mother’s outing is putting on him. That, the active highway, and the chill air are the reasons why sitting out on the patio at a quaint coffee shop isn’t as idyllic as one would expect. I would say that the cars passing by sound like fuming waves curving over one another and lapping their mouths against the sand as though it’s something to eat, but it doesn’t. The cars sound like cars, despite how much I wish they sounded otherwise. If I were on a clean pier, the wind would be tolerable. If the birds cawing were really seagulls, if the view I was looking on were really an ocean instead of a Wal-Mart. But it’s not. I’m at a Starbucks on a major highway watching cars pass by. The music here is nice, though. Starbucks always plays good music. It’s the only aspect of their business that allows me to cling onto my escapist vision.
But I should be careful about these visions. That is my problem after all – escapist, daydreamer, fantasizer. It is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it lets me brainstorm for imaginative stories, on the other it blurs my perception of life. I have to be okay with sitting at a Starbucks overlooking a highway and a Wal-Mart and noisy, enginous cars (yes, I just made that word up; I should petition it for the dictionary). And you know what? Right now, I am okay with it. I’m okay with it because I’m writing about it. I think that’s the biggest cause of all this discomfiture and grief I’ve been feeling. I don’t go out and do things like this for writing. I don’t write for myself anymore period. I write for other things such as school and applications for school and everything else but because it makes me happy, because when I’m sitting at a coffee shop feeling a little down on myself just the act of pecking out the words with some hint of purpose makes me feel ten times lighter than it did before I ordered by drink. So the birds flying around aren’t seagulls and almost every time you get back to your car from buying the week’s groceries you find they’ve left a crusty, white present on your windshield. So what if your view is a bland grocery store, and the sounds surrounding you are rushing tires and pulsing stereos. You can live with that. I can live with that.
My problem is that I’ve forgotten what it means to be a writer, and because of that I’ve forgotten what it means to be myself. I can never be the same person I was before this simple revelation. I can only move forward and grow into another skin. Like a snake, but not as creepy or slithery.
The past few days since I last posted, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to do after graduation. I’ve already told you at least a thousand times that I’m no longer interested in doing the MFA program. So this week I was thinking about applying for a Master of Arts program in English. But as I was thinking about it today and what being in a graduate program in general would mean for me, I thought it might not be the best move to apply just yet. Another one of my problems is that I like to move too fast, make decisions too quickly, only to realize a day or so later that it may not feel as right as I thought it had. The new ideas always seem like the right ones until I sit on them for a few days and their seat cushions aren’t as comfortable as I thought they’d been. You need to take a break from school. You have issues you need to sort out, and you need to give yourself time and space to figure out what path you need to take. And maybe that’s grad school and maybe that’s not. But you need to give yourself the space to figure that out.
As I drove away from campus gnawing on these thoughts, I knew that voice was right. The voice that always looks out for me, the one who I can always trust to think clearly when my own brain can’t do the job. My relationship with God for the past few years has been…lacking, to say the least. I constantly weaken myself with my own doubts and worries, and I feel like it’s an effort at times just to function – that I don’t know how to live properly. I don’t like to think that bad things are going to happen to me or someone I care for, or that things may change the way I live my life – like death or injury or someone moves away or gets married or something, but I cloud myself from that. What if something does happen? It almost seems like a jinx to ask, but what if it does? I mean, I think everyone needs to ask themselves that question. How will you cope? How will you live with yourself? I’m sitting here at a Starbucks, for God’s sake, fighting my own words. I’m putting to action the gift He gave me of writing and at the same time I’m fighting my heart and my mind simultaneously, the two biggest tools to art we have.
I have to write, but I don’t have to go to college to do it. I have to write because I have to ask myself these questions, and I feel that writing is the answer to all of them. I have to write. Not just because God gave this wonderful gift I need not take advantage of, but because if I don’t I very much think that I will go insane otherwise. And getting to sit here like this, free of school and work at the moment is amazing. We all need these moments. And putting myself back in another two to three year commitment of school will only drive me crazy. I know it will. At least if I were to do it now. I need to be able to breathe, to live, to grow into the person God wants me to be. And, maybe I’m wrong, but of all the growing they say you’ll do in college, these past two years especially, I feel more like I’ve retraced my steps back to where I was before – mentally, emotionally. Maybe I’m smarter, maybe I can write a better paper, and maybe I can organize my thoughts better, but other than that college has been a series of grievances. I don’t need to put myself through that again after graduation. Not until it’s my choice. For now, I just want to live. For now, I just want to write.