Aston, PA – The Tail Tucked Between My Legs
I’m a bit of an open book. I wasn’t always, though. I was shy, collected and ultimately closed off from a world that, at its very best, plowed indifference against me. My time in Aston marks a time in my life that is a monument to my own force of indifference – a winter-like vacuum I kept clung around my body like a freshly-washed coat.
When I met Jessie, I opened up to another person like I had never done before. It sounds like how a cup of Splenda-sweetened lemonade tastes: powerfully, eye-squintingly, diaphragm-seizingly, stomach-wretchingly sweet, but, I tumbled into trusting another human being that hadn’t raised me. It was a terrible and beautiful time – parts of my person that hadn’t seen sunlight in years were suddenly being bleached by rays of contentedness, and everything in my brain that hinged on that oily sadness that soaked my entire being was suddenly wrung out and made dry. It was like starting over again as a rich and freshly-washed human being.
Things didn’t stay that way, though. Our relationship crumbled apart and I was left standing in the rubble, wondering what I just put two years of my life into. Zen teaches one to embrace the impermanence of all things, and I had just spent that time wrapping my world in some kind of anti-Zen. I wasn’t incomplete, but rather, reeling from the loss. I recall feeling drunk on grief, lumping thousands of memories into a grey, unintelligible mass of goop that sloshed around while I walked and poisoned memories I had locked away in hopes of always remembering them as good.
After weeks of finding it too difficult to even stand up, I picked up my phone and called my parents. I took a weekend sabbatical, packed up my car and took the long drive down the Pennsylvania Turnpike back home to the comforting, familiar shores of home. As I arrived, I drove past rows of homes that seemed all too familiar, yet still so foreign. They whizzed just outside sight of my eyes, combining into the grey gruel that already weighed my head down.
When I pulled into my neighborhood and stepped out of my car to stretch my aching legs, I noticed the ribbon of sidewalks that draped itself diligently around the streets where I grew up. I remembered walking those streets at night to clear my head. I looked at them with a hands-in-your-pockets kind of mood, remembering that I had never been happy when I took that journey. I remembered that I looked forward to taking that walk with Jessie so that I could finally break the habit of feeling sorry for myself.
But, she broke up with me before we had the chance to try it out.
Later that evening, I took the walk on those worn and cracked sidewalks, tail planted firmly between my legs. I went to bed early that night.
