The Sum Of My Parts

Once there was a girl.

That girl once stepped off a jetway and into another world. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. It was where she learned the fine art of cynicism, where she learned to hide her feelings behind a snappy, sarcastic comeback.

It was where she learned that she was a writer. Into books bound with cloth she poured out all the hopes and fears she hid behind that wall.

It was where she was the most real.

***

I’ve started working out again.

Three times now in as many days, I’ve laced up my shoes and gotten on the treadmill to walk. It hurts; my back and my knees are so tender from arthritis. It also feels good to sweat, to take some small modicum of control over my destiny.

I’m up against the wall a lot these days. I don’t feel powerful. I feel hemmed in by people and places, and I want to scream with all of the intensity of my pent-up ambitions and desires. I want something so badly, and, frankly, I’m not even sure what that thing is anymore.

I’m not sure it has a tangible form.

When I walk, that pressure escapes like air from a valve and my mind loosens its grip on my heart. I wear my headphones and the music that I listened to as a teenager perfecting her ennui funnels into my ears.

I close my eyes and I’m in London. I see myself with a painful clarity. I see myself resisting her siren song, resisting the peculiar beauty of the Swiss Cottage tube station and the garbage that blew along the banks of the Thames — resisting until I fell head over heels in love.

I see her eating Dunkin Donuts at midnight, after pub crawling with her few trusted friends. I see her, in her oversized shirts and her mini-skirts, flirting with older men on the train while her BFF giggled behind her.

I see her and I want to reach out to her, and tell her to take that fork in the road when it comes.

I spend so much of my time wishing I could change the past. I can’t, and I wonder how long it will be before I finally learn my lesson; that nothing good comes of regret.

Until just recently, I’ve been on an upward trajectory. I felt nothing could stop me. I did and said and wrote things that astonished even me. How cheeky, to be so bold! Especially for me.

Suddenly, the last two months, I’ve felt every inch a failure. I wish I didn’t, but there it is. I thought I was within a hair’s breadth of it.

Within millimeters of that intangible thing.

That thing I want so badly is, I think, freedom.

***

When I walk and I listen to those songs, the same ones that nearly deafened me when I turned up the volume on my Walkman to hear them over the noise of the trains, I think about those years spent in London.

I was so free then.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that girl is the same person who wearily pulls herself out of bed every morning, fresh worries and concerns lingering in the air like the steam over a hot cup of coffee. It’s like that interlude happened to someone else.

But she is me. I am her. The 22 years between us are nothing but a figment. No one can take that experience away from me. Some days, especially here, I marvel at the flamboyant independence of that girl.

I carry those days in my pocket like a smooth piece of quartz. I turn them over and over in my palm until they come to life, warm from my touch.

***

Sometimes I wonder if this is all just a mid-life crisis. If I’m not just a living cliche, on the cusp of 40 and looking back at a life half-lived. A life lived hovering so close to the safety net that I never really got to see the view from the tightrope.

Why, I wonder, why is it so hard for me to just be happy with what I have at the moment? Why am I always straining forward to see what’s around the corner?

What is it like to be content? Are you content with your life as it is? How does that feel?

I can’t even imagine.

***

I’m not unhappy.

Some of you will read this, and you’ll worry. Or you’ll roll your eyes at my endless introspection, and mutter under your breath that I need to shut up, already. That I’m blessed and that life is one beautiful bowl of cherries so get with the program and plaster a smile on your face.

I am blessed.

But I want more.

I want more than what I have. I want what that girl wanted, that girl who loved the smell of the Underground and the way her legs looked in black tights.

I want everything I can get.

***

When you look at me, you see a slightly overweight woman who has two children and a husband in graduate school. You see my bare face and my ripped jeans, my mini-van and the small town I live in.

You don’t see what’s inside me. I am not just that woman with the gray streak in her hair.

I am the sum of all my parts.

Even if you can’t see them, they’re there. And no one can take that away from me.