i keep thinking about that girl, the 19-year-old who spent forty hours or more a week behind the counter at the corner gas station, the one whose gaze wandered every evening to the chain restaurant across the street and the sun that always set behind it.
i wonder what she worried about then. she had just started her first term at the community college, and she had three classes to juggle, homework assignments that were always due sooner than she could finish them. she thought a lot about the people in the cars that stopped at the intersection, the cashiers and sales-people from the nearby mall flocking to the highway, checking their reflections in the small visor mirrors that flashed strange morse codes her direction as they were flipped down to block the sun. she thought about the men in pressed suits who bought cigarettes and flicked their eyes over her before paying and rushing out, their gold bands flashing briefly as they pulled the door closed behind them. she thought about the mothers who left their children in carseats in sedans parked at the pump and stood inside in line to pay, stretching their necks every fifteen seconds and peering through the windowed wall to make sure they weren't gone.
she thought about herself, i'm sure. she worried, according to the moleskine of that time, that she didn't know who she was. she worried that moving in with l. in a couple of weeks was a bad idea and she worried that everything she was doing was opposite of what she really wanted. she worried that she didn't know her mom, that their phone conversations were always stilted and brief, and she worried that her job, her friends, her choices were encasing her in plaster that would harden and never disappear.
she dreamed of adopting a mutt whom she would call ralph waldo, and she imagined loading a volkswagen rabbit with "the bare necessities" for a cross-country roadtrip: a guitar, a 35mm camera and film, a box of books, a tent and blankets, hiking boots, jeans and flannel, an axe for firewood and notebooks for writing. she dreamed that she would sell everything she owned so she wouldn't feel tied to any place other than her car, and then she would simply live.
two years later, i envy that girl, the one who dreamed without apology. what happened to her? who stifled her and put me in her place? i am terrified to dream, and when i do--however tentatively--i am embarrassed when i admit it. i work half as many hours as i did then, now at a more socially-approved cafe, and somehow i feel even less alive than i did then. the plaster that i worried about--did it set? or was it something else? was it breaking up with l. and then struggling to pay the rent myself for the remaining ten months of the lease? was it quitting smoking? was it going vegan? was it getting sasha and becoming a cat person? was it reading only textbooks for month after month, leaving my favorite books to gather as much dust as my picture frame of mom?
i don't know.
i don't know where she is, the other julie, and maybe--maybe i have this backwards. maybe i don't want her back--maybe the paralyzed, stunted julie i am now is just a necessary product of transitioning towards the right direction. maybe, now that i am moving towards my longest-lasting dreams (towards university! towards peace corps and ukraine! towards writing, and a lifetime of poverty!), i have to deal with unraveling the knots that had pulled me into myself since i failed art school and started working at the gas station. to undo knots, in my experience, sometimes you must briefly pull them tighter.
perhaps i must first experience one extreme (unbridled dreams for the future that have no connection to the present) and the other (a tense myopia, thinking only of the next two days) before i can learn to negotiate both and transform into a more functional version of myself. but fuck. i want to be more functional now--i want to plan for the future while completing tasks for tomorrow, to apply to colleges months in advance and have the essay that's due in a few days in my instructor's email inbox before class begins.
i'm just so, so tired.
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