my heart is a glorious machine;

I didn't update for days because I had nothing to say, except I do have things to say, loads of them, and yet I can never seem to untangle them into words clear enough to type. And I don't know, exactly, if what I want to say is lovely or dreary, or rain-grey tired, which seems to be what my life is, once again, descending into. I feel tired, and though I have a compulsion to write in my pretty new hardback notebook every night, there doesn't seem to be much life to it, and when I read it over in the morning I'm always dissatisfied. 

I miss being on holiday and having things and people and the city. Egad, I miss the city. Sometimes I feel so compressed in this little town that I feel as if I may go mad, and yet there are too many things that tie me to it: the Meholicks, the Peaceable Kingdom, my backyard, the shop where I take my guitar lessons, Dad's music friends (who I shadow admiringly). I suppose that wherever one goes, almost, one leaves a part of oneself behind, and while one may have one true home, one still feels spread about, with a bit of an anchor here, a longing for there. I miss Boston sometimes so much that it almost hurts, and it's not just the city-feeling, it's Boston (and the Boston area in general), even with the mad traffic and the madder politics; it's the flavour and the places: Louisa May Alcott's home, creaky floors and furniture preserved in frozen antiquity; New Bedford with its still-cobblestone streets; the jammed-together tumbledown houses, a hundred, two hundred years old, divided into apartments; the history, Paul Revere's tiny house gasping for breath amidst city traffic and skyscrapers; the subways with their grimy windows and graffitti and strange people, and the subway stations full of vendors and noise and advertisements and people. It's the culture: the sheer number of writers who were born in or who lived in Massachusetts for a significant time is staggering. The museums, the subway musicians, the free concerts, the way you walk into a shop and hear five different languages at once, or look across the cityscape and find a mosque, a Catholic church, and assorted temples--Jewish, Buddhist, and who knows what else.

You know? It wasn't the same in Virginia Beach, and it won't be the same in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles (although I would never move to California: no winter, and too much pop culture!). 

I don't know what any of this has to do with anything, actually. I'm feeling tired and nostalgic and tired, trying not to be depressed and failing. I watched television today, tried to read, ate a little too much, played the same song three times on my guitar. I'm so sick of this house, and yet the idea that we may have to leave it abruptly frightens and disconcerts me. And I hate, hate, hate this not-knowing, this not-planning, this too-familiar uncertainty: I don't know what I'm doing in a month, or two, or three; if we'll be getting back to our feet, or if Dad will still be looking for something. I'm counting on college as an escape: no matter what happens, I will get out in two, maybe three years. I hope it doesn't take that long, but I never know anything. It took five years to get out of New England. (And here I am, wanting so badly to go back. That's how I know there was something amazing about it: even after how awful most of my time there was, I still love it like mad.) 

I don't know what I'm saying, now.