To A Poet

DAY FIFTY-ONE: The Pauper Returns

There's something about returning from vacation that is one of the most unsettling feelings you can experience.  We've all experienced it.  It's this hardened pit stuck in your core that slowly seeps its way into your esophagus until you feel like you might actually choke on your own anxiety.  You get to have the highest of highs; seeing beautiful sites, spending time with loved ones, and simply being away from the doldrums of responsibility.  But when you return, you are reminded of the every day.  The ordinary.  The doldrums of responsibility.

Because of this common feeling, I figured I had concocted a solution to the Back in Town Blues.  I quit my job, and then I bought a plane ticket out to London to see my family.  My thought process being, I'll come home from vacation and still be on vacation.  I don't have to drag myself into an office that fills my every essence with self-loathing.  Instead, I can still sleep in.  Still go take a random walk around town.  Still do whatever I want and ignore the doldrums.

But what I did not anticipate is that a more fearsome sense of anxiety lurked around the corner of my return.  A one-two punch to the gut that makes the hardened pit of returning to work life seem like a game of patty-cake with your two-year-old niece.

I'll begin with the first pang.  Imagine being surrounded by undying love and support for two weeks straight.  Not simply some tangential love that you know always exists, but actually feeling it, seeing it, and touching it.  Feeling the embrace of your parents that you haven't felt in close to a year.  The look in their eye when you say something that you know they are proud to hear.  A look and a feeling that can't be replicated via Skype, no matter how hard our scientists and engineers try to put our lives online.  Imagine all this love that you anticipate as you walk out of customs at Heathrow; the thrill of seeing your mother giddy as a, well, mother who hasn't seen her daughter in nearly a year.  And then contrast that with the feeling of walking out of customs at O'Hare International Airport 12 days later.  A long flight that you can still feel in your legs 3 hours later.  Your hair is greasy - not seeing a point in showering that morning.  And you walk out of customs to signs of fanfare for other passengers.  The same terminal you've greeted many a visitor in the past, but now you must make your own personal walk of shame to the taxi cab line because you are too exhausted to drag your stupid suitcase all the way to the train.  It's a feeling of emptiness.  Of loneliness.  Of realizing the best things in life are fleeting.

But even worse is the moment a newly unemployed young writer walks into her apartment and realizes there truly are no more excuses.  Vacation is over.  It's time to write.  And forcing yourself to get up every morning and maintaining this amorphous schedule is probably the scariest thing I've ever faced.  Scarier than Disney World's Alien Encounter ride at 10 years old.  Scarier than pulling the ripcord on Daredevil Dive.  Scarier than getting my heartbroken.  If I fuck this up, it's not because I'm not talented (I've finally convinced myself that isn't true).  No.  If I fuck this up, it's because I didn't try my damnedest.  Failure will only happen because of laziness or fear.  If I fuck this up, I have no one to blame but myself.

Dear reader, please excuse the ramblings.  I spent about 8 hours pondering what I wanted to write (and watching "The Way Way Back" and reading "Gone Girl", and staring out the window while listening to my ipod, but who's counting?)  But dear reader, one thing I highly recommend if you ever find yourself flying over top the snowy peaks of Greenland and Northern Canada, please do yourself a favor and put down the Candy Crush, pause "White House Down", and just take it in.  Preferably while listening to some Nordic band who really knows their lyrical way around snowy atmospheres.  My drink of choice: First Aid Kit.  It is breathtaking.