This has been feeling like a universal experience, one I've never had, that of a kid who's leaving their rural home, leaving those they love behind, riding the bus with ripped bags in tow, a dirty sweatshirt on with the name of their hometown, with nothing much but hopes and fears and memories, only I'm not 18, but when I was 18 I was already in the big city (or near enough, for you sticklers). I went all of twenty minutes away to join the throng of dreamers, but then, well, I had no dreams.
I'm not sure what mine are now, but the day came that I had to leave the place I thought I'd made home. Almost 20 years which both flew and crawled by, as time does.
I stared out the window of this bus for the duration of the ride through Maine, passing familiar sights, seeing ones I'd never noticed before, seeing the beauty and the starkness (not opposites, no). There are so few farms left in Maine, but I thought if I was still raising sheep, I would have stayed. If I still felt connected to the land, I would have stayed. I felt connected through the birds and the seasons, but there are birds and seasons everywhere. I had come to live a suburban life, and ever since I was a kid, my opinion of suburbia was low. As I passed great swathes of bog and rolling hills punctuated everywhere by Walmarts and Home Depots and Dunkin Donuts and all the rest, I thought the same thing I thought when I was young "give me the wild places or the city. What's in between holds nothing for me."
Yes, I lived in the proverbial middle-of-nowhere, but I didn't leave there like it was. I had stopped walking outside on a starlit night and appreciating the stars. I yearned to walk the city streets. I yearned to meet strangers daily. Yes, yes, I keep on repeating it - it was time to leave, and now I'm on my way, on this Peter Pan bus, a middle-aged woman doing what kids do every day.
Tomorrow I'll be putting the key into the door of my new apartment and I will feel completely and totally dislocated, I'm sure. I'm scared as hell. Or am I just writing that without reflection?
Every day people move in this big city. I suppose my hopes and dreams are not as big as many. I had said I didn't know what mine are, but I have a few. They are small. Nothing to write about, I suppose. I just want to live a life. If I can pay the rent and the bills and have a bit left over each month, I'll be quite satisfied. If I develop bigger dreams, I won't be surprised. If I lose sight of why I've done this, I won't be surprised either.
Life in Maine is both hard and easy. It's easy to live life as if in a dream there. That big world, even the rest of America, feels very far away.
Many years ago I knew a doctor who said that most of the people who'd come to Maine lived life like they were refugees. When I heard him utter that word - refugee - I knew he was right. I was once a refugee from the go-go 80's New York where I lived for buying shoes (here comes the confession!), expensive dinners, and ridiculously priced haircuts. That wasn't all -it's not so neat a package - I yearned for spiritual connection, connection to the land, and connection to the past through my crafts. And back then, my crafts meant nothing to anyone. In New England, there were others who cared about the same things I did.
WIthin two weeks of living in Maine, I had an incredible circle of friends and a life I'd only dreamt about. I was in heaven.
Over the years, that heaven faded, along with everything. Friends left every year. Relationships ended. I gave up raising sheep, and started living an urban life in the country, or at least trying to. It was still good. I wouldn't trade in working at a tattoo shop in Downeast Maine for anything, or the nearly ten years I had my own shop. It was mostly all good.
This is not just a fairy tale I'm telling myself, no. It's my finally seeing things for what they are and were. There was much that was hard. The growing isolation. The impossibility (for me) to be completely self reliant. Then, the complacency. Living for years knowing I was living a half life, and getting almost all my input from the outside world from the Web, which I'm grateful for, but really, that's not living, at least not for me.
I suppose that since I'm not a kid, this journey I'm starting today seems all the bigger because I've got so many years of memories and people left behind, and with a lifetime of experience, I don't have the blind optimism of youth (not that I ever have).
I am thinking about whether I'll post this. It seems too personal, though when has that ever stopped me? But still.
So, if I do (and I haven't decided yet), I want to make this more universal. If this nearly old lady (lady?) can be brave, anyone can. The years I spent in Maine were punctuated by both large and small breakdowns of the nervous kind, and I was once told I'd never be okay. If that were so, I wouldn't be on this bus.
Photo note: Photograph entitled "Ellis Island Processing." My great-grandparents came through here, and I"m scared? Ha!
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