Sometimes it feels like I’m looking for the edges of me. Like I’m going as far as I can to see what’s there, at the end of the world. It feels like my insides are flat and I might one day find where it ends, where the whole picture of me comes together like a map.
That’s how it feels.
But really what I’m probably looking for is the top and the bottom. It’s not flat terrain inside. It goes up and it goes down and all of this searching is for the highs, but the lows are there too and I don’t know how far they go, either.
This weekend I drove 3 hours to see my college friends. We spent 3 hours together and I missed them before I even left them. We got Korean food and lost in a bookstore and then went to an art gallery where I thought about how much we had all changed from the art students we once were. I thought of all the strange and distant places life had taken us from who we thought we would be. I thought about the map I’d once had of myself, when I thought I knew where all of the roads went. How young and sweet and stupid to think that at 22 I had found all of the edges, completed my map.
Then I drove 3 hours home. I walked the dogs and tried to pack for a climbing day tomorrow but found that I simply couldn’t. My last day home without working was 41 days ago. In the past month I’d driven to Pittsburgh to help a friend move, taught intro to outdoor rock climbing, Wilderness First Aid, Caving, Adaptive Climbing and spent Mother’s day chauffeuring my mom around to try and give her the nicest day possible. For a few weeks in April, I had worked 100+ hours in a single week at 2 different jobs.
I was dizzy and tired. I’d found an edge to add to my topography. And then I went to bed.
