We’re Strictly Ballroom

Dwell between the backseat and the horizon

And in someone else’s house abide,

Then move along for greater reasons.

Hide

The image of home in a dark corner of your heart

And put ripples of light behind it.

Often when you’re lost

You find comfort in a friendly pair of jeans

thats forever new.

Keep your shadow close to endorse

That it doesn’t escape you

In the haze of a night gone wrong

And leave you a little less whole.

If you use your demons to justify

Eons and ions of bad choices and space,

All the spirits of your high and low places

will sigh.

Yay poems from the warped tour!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfBw0IWwO5U

Its been a year since Owen went missing and I feel as thoug the next few days deserves a nod. Although Im not quite sure what to say.

Im going to be in Petaluma June 1st through the 3rd. The first is an old friends birthday party, the second signifies a year, and the third is for heading home. I feel like I should do something on the second, which will probably just mean seeing Stephanie and or going to the river. It really doesnt feel like its been that long. guh.

Im also on the prowl for new employment for reasons I could list for days.

I’ve been thinking a lot. Looking back on who I was in the not to distant past and further. Sometimes its amazing, how even the slightest changes mean so much. I went to a party the other night, filled with people who were once good friends, an old boyfriend and people who offered couches and bedrooms and safe places to stay and live and party and be me. I got a lot of people who were shocked and happy to see me. a lot of “Where have you been!”s and “How are ya/what have you been up to”s and i feel like I owe them so much and yet never see them. and the whole thing felt like it didnt fit right. Like putting on shoes that were to big or small or, better yet, stretched out. I feel like Im not that girl anymore, but I am still, in a wierd way. Ive learned from the victorys and defeats and everything in that time period and cut everthing else out? The whole thing is hard to explain. How Im feeling and able to explain the whole thing. and Im tired.

In other news, well, there is no other real news I guess. My parents are comming tomorrow, and I could bitch for days about work when in reality I had a good time closeing the theater tonight with dave,  and well, life will be as such, but in the meantime I guess whats important is that when it comes down to it all, Im really pretty happy with life right now.

I’m caught up in finals and the end of the semester crunch and not having the internet at home, that I’ve been kind of scatter brained, but alas! I’m almost done!

Recently I’ve been hit with carity. And finally feel like I’ve found that direction Ive been trying to mold for quite some time now.

When I came home from the warped tour for good, I felt like it was all over, I was just left with feelings of loss that I didnt face before I left and a new semester at a new school in a new(ish) city. I now feel like Ive reached the next phase of my life. The phase I hear ‘adults’ talk about so much, when you blink and a year has passed. Because I dont know where the hell these past 12 months went. And if my exsistance were a short paragraph, I feel like those months have all been in parenthesis. Ive been cutting to the point, pulling everything togther, buiding a foundation and setting new goals. I’ve done and expierenced so much and yet i feel as though i have very little to show for it. Sometimes it takes awhile, i suppose.

Its sort of a drag, I guess, seeing as how much Im enjoying this stage my life is in. Ive seen that everyone eventually ends up in the same place, but none of us know when we will end up there. So maybe it isnt about getting there, but about where you are now, and how you feel about being there. A year ago I felt like a fuckup and lost, and totally unprepared for the impending heartbreak, and then the triumphs of being on tour. I now realize that with every defeat there are a million little victories, and with every victory, there may be a bunch of little defeats.

Nothing is ever one thing.

And I dont know why it took me so long. But Ive realized that everyone is so influenced by everything around them that they may not have any real clue of why they do what they do. We spend so much time trying to be different but we are so concerend that something we are feeling or doing is abnormal. We hardly know ourselves.

All of this makes me feel pretty good about being anywhere and doing anything as long as it feels right for me. I needed to hang out in the parenthesis alittle bit, and maybe Im almost out of the woods, but you never know.

Im moving out of the 420 house tomorrow. and I can’t help but feel as though this is the end of an era.

Its nights like this one that remind me of a night when I was 12. The last night my family was staying in the house I practically grew up in in Oakland. I was sleeping on my grandmas bedroom floor and scared of the changes that would take place living in Petaluma. I didnt know what kind of people I would meet there and how my life would be different in a positive or negative way. I was terrified of Junior High in suburbia(with good reason) and then eventually High School, in a place I had never heard of before.

Flash forward to me being 21. After Jr, High and High school and with an AA in Auto Mechanics and Costume Design and still roughly based in Petaluma. I had spent a year and a half couch surfing in West Oakland and living in Apartments without the landlords knowledge. I had a stable job at a movie theater in Petaluma and pretty much living with my parents a lot at the point I moved to San Francisco. I had done a lot of growing up in Petaluma too, my teenage years were intense, at best, and my twenties were shaping up to be as well. I was still nervous though, to step out of what became my comfort zone and move on to be on my own, officially. Finally.

Now here I am again. Not a year later, the last night at this apartment, where I feel like Ive done a solid amount of changes. After Owen and the Warped Tour and dealing with just the everyday things that your first official year on your own can bring. I feel like the changes have been sort of monsterous and yet I’ve never really felt them occur. (except for Owen, that hurt, and still does, and may always). Whats next year going to be like for me? A year from now will I be shitting my pants over moving to the East Coast? Will I love my roommates in the Castro so much that I won’t want to leave them? Will there be a boy? Anyone? Who will I be on May 1st 2009? Any less me then I am now and yet so much different? or not at all?

I may never get all the answers to the questions of life, but I will never stop asking them. I feel though, that Ive also got a wonderful group of people who will help me and watch me through these changes, and theirs as well. Will they still be here at this time next year?

I feel like there is so much more that I want to say, adn yet I don’t know how to put them into words.

As I promised though, here is a poem I wrote about the year I hitched to burning man. I wrote it on a recipt from work so it hasnt been through workshop or editing or anything.

I knew a Desert Once

I knew a desert once.

Some people compare themselves

To an ever changing body

of water.

But me,

I met up with me in a desert

Between a goat guy

And an elf king

And I as a fairy

In the spiritual glow

Of the statue of a man

on fire.

I knew a desert once

With sunburned

Windblown faces.

Barreling towards civilization,

In the depths of a gypsy caravan

And a thumb

a little worse for wear.

I knew a desert once

I’m not the fairy I was before this.

I didn’t know her any better then,

Then I do now

But I know I knew a desert once.

Wild eyed and tongue tied

You helped make me whole.

In the dreary summer glow

You showed me that dreamers

And dreams

Can find each other in this windstorm.

I knew a desert once.

more poems to come, these next few weeks for school Im going to be writing a lot.