Stream of Consciousness

I've been poking around all night, feeling like I should sit down and write, but can't justify it 'cause I've got nothing to say. I'm sitting in my kitchen, and its ten till 12, I'm listening to Jason Mraz mix with midnight, and wondering how long I can get away with this before I pass out or the crazy cat lady next door starts complaining. I'm thinking about sitting and watching the sunset, and wishing I wasn't, but I can't get the sound of the rigging clanging and the geese and the seagulls and I swear I heard it get quieter as the light diminished. Maybe it was just me. Most likely it was just me. I'm sitting here trying to remember how the water does that slow dance, rising and falling, and like magic my breathing slows to match it, the world slows to match it, everything falls in time to the cadence of the quiet rhythmic heaving. I'm remembering all the other stolen sunsets, sitting and watching and wondering which was more beautiful, retiring the day, or just having the presence of mind to sit and just be. Be. Yes. Life is so cluttered, so rarely do I realize it, until things are splashed into my face. Like paying $75 bucks at the airport for the privledge of hauling all my worldly possessions from one side of the country to the other. Only to arrive home to more useless crap. I'm such a pack-rat, case in point for my pragmatism versus romanticism. How the fuck did I convince myself my third grade swimming ribbons mean something? Or walking across Virginia, emerging from the wilds of the Appalachian Trail and my mind to the top of some clear quintessential bald, pouring rain, to peer out upon civilization, only to realize, I have everything I need to survive right there. Sobering. Enlightening. I swear, one day I will through hike it. Or at least attempt. There, thus added to the neverending list of Peggy's unnamable pipedreams. Right up there with becoming an interpreter. Or a concert caliber musician. Its almost as if, if I make my passions known, I might just convince myself into acting on them. And that invites investing myself wholeheartedly. And that risks, well, more than I'm willing. I've talked myself into enough headless risk for a while, enough for my tastes. Off to California in a few weeks to commence/continue masquerading as an adult. I'm actually, contrary to popular belief, that shit frightens the crap out of me. In an intriguing kind of way, yes, but still. Scared. Shitless. Maybe its because I take on so much responsibility normally, but usually its nothing to life threatening. Not, you know, paying rent, food shopping, watching out for money. That is something very very different. Honestly, more than anything else, I think I'm actually finally ready to be in the same place with the same people for more than nine months at a time. I guess that's a constant battle of mine--lassitude, contentment, or wanderlust. I feel like I've basically been new for the past five years running. Yes, I've chosen that, sought it out, drempt about it even, but that doesn't make it less exhausting. Freshman year of high school, sure, I'll give them that. Sophomore year, not really new, but did the whole new friends thing after everyone graduated. Junior year I fled, and senior year same old story. And now the blissful ecstasy of college, but no, that can't even be good enough for me and I have to run away again. Don't get me wrong, I have every faith in myself and god knows who or what else that Russia will amaze. I know this. I know I will get so much out of it, and tomorrow I'll probably wake up reaching for the day I can leave the country. Sometimes it makes me feel like a turtle, with my house on my back. Only problem is its too small for anyone but me. I'm getting better at holding on to people through wrenching departures, but that too breeds a sick complacency. I get to thinking that the good people remain, the people I'm most close to, the ones that mean the most will make a point of sticking by me throw all my gallivanting. That's sick though, I mean, some of it has got to fall on me, leaving everything to fate is absurd. The only person that leaves pissed is me. Productive, check. I think I miss music, maybe that's where all of this is coming from. I haven't sat down and played for more than a month. I can feel it, feel myself quaking for it, but knowing that when I do summon up the courage to sit and pound and band and caress, it'll be highly anticlimactic. And I'll be pissed at myself for letting go of so much. I hate it that not caring never used to matter, I hate it that now that I've pinned so much importance to everything that I've discovered this year, I can't go back to being jaded, I can't go back to pretending. Nor would I want to. But everything requires so much more energy now, then skating by used to. But I'm not a bare minimum kind of child, I can't be, I hate myself when I am. That's part of why this semester made me so angry, because I was so swamped and confused and foggy and misguided and present and contemplative and free that school got put last, music kept me glued, but studies, yea, severely neglected. I hate committing to something and then seeing it shittily through. Like, whets the use of being there if you can't fulfill your duties, why bother. Out of my not so stellar GPA, I'm more possessed by my A- in Russian than anything else. More than my C in Spanish, B in Inventing America, B- in Logic. That A- killed the most because thats what I love, thats where my heart goes when my mind wanders, thats what I do with my brain turned off. Thats what I see devoting myself too, even over music, I'd choose it over that sanity. A big fat reminder of how much I don't have things together, how far I let things go, how much I let intrude between me and getting things done. Well done, Peggy, nicely done. I don't mind fucking up for things that I don't care about. But for things that matter, I tear myself apart. We won't even talk about performance anxiety and self criticism. I'm magically hoping that I'll come back from the Old continent next year and be the poised, self confident, witty, expressive person whom I attempt to exude. And most definitely not friends with my stage fright demons. Bah. I wish it would storm. I can feel the tension building in the air, hot and heavy, electric. Or maybe that's just me.