Bullets for A…

My morning so far has consisted of coffee, dog food, dog crap, and dog blood.  I love Skordo, I really do, but he has been a bit of a handful this morning.  Allow me to elaborate:  we are running our same route that we always do every morning.  He stops to do his business and my iPod (always on shuffle mode when running) turns to the perfect song at the perfect moment.  For all that are not familiar with Alkaline Trio Radio, I recommend you take a listen and you too will laugh just as audibly as I did on a very busy road while scooping up dog shit.  It was perfect, minus the dog shit in a bag.  After we arrived home, I noticed scattered blood spots on the white tile in the shape of paw prints.  Needless to say, somewhere on the 100ft. of gravel that we ran on, the boy must have cut his paw and he was now attempting to recreate Hansel and Gretel with bloody paw prints.  I found him, cleaned up the blood, and am now enjoying coffee #2.  Skordo, you are a pain at times.

That paragraph has virtually no consequence over the remainder of this post but I felt the need to share it anyway.

Every Friday night, my mother and I have ‘date night’.  It is the only night we have off together every week and we usually go to our favorite sushi restaurant and follow it with Borders/movie or watch a movie at home.  We skipped the Borders/movie and chose to watch a movie at home instead.  Over dinner though, she asked me a question that I knew I would have trouble answering immediately.  A, here are your answers:

“Mary, what have you learned from moving here?”  (to avoid very long paragraphs, enjoy the bullets)

• I am shockingly content being alone.  While I know many of my posts leading up to The Move were about my quest for solitude, simplicity, and calm, I could never have understood what I was getting myself into until I actually did it.  And it was awkward…at first.  I have found that as I drift to sleep at 10pm, I awake refreshed, comfortable, and though not taking part in the normal scene of my age group, I am able to find an awareness of self that I would not have had if I hadn’t imposed this need for solitude.  To be quite honest, there is a sizable level of complication missing from my life and I am OK with that.
• I have found that my love for music dives deeper than the sheer enjoyment of sound.  It is an absolute need in my life.  Every moment seems to have a song attached to it and maybe it’s just me constructing a twisted, self-fulfilling soundtrack for my life, but I need those words, those rhymes, and those notes.  I remember driving across the country unable to listen to certain music (my favorite, my blood, my passion) because his name was attached with such force of memory to those words.  I now find myself listening to those very songs again with only a smile for having known such a feeling, and even more of one knowing they are my songs again, not his.
• I look at myself differently in the mirror now.  I had a boss once that said women don’t know who they are until they turn 27.  Well, though I am nearing 25 (in three weeks…insert panic and mild excitement at the ability to rent a car in all 50 states), I feel I am on the way there.  If I had stayed, I would have stayed in a strange bout of unrequited love with someone that would have only hindered any level of progress I could have made.  I am not 100% yet of who I am, but I certainly know myself better than I did nine months ago.  And that checklist of requirements for a future partner has only grown, but is now omitting details that I once carried with such weight and absolute desire.
• My overall view of what I want in life, that whole “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question has not really shifted, but certain parts I have removed.  My answer was always to be happy.  That was it.  But I assumed that happiness would involve a partner, a great job, a child, etc.  I may have said this before but as the years continue on and I see my high school friends get married and have children, while I look at their lives in happiness, I don’t envy them.  I am elated that I am not married right now and in an effort of honesty, I don’t see myself having children.  Ever.  Maybe in 10 years I might bite my tongue at that comment but it’s not something I want badly enough and I don’t think I am the right woman for the job.  My mother was and is (she is incredible), and I could never compete with that.

There are many other things that I have gathered since moving here, but I’ll save them for another time.  There is one other thing though…I know I moved here to move to Key West and to be alone on my island with my dog and cat.  Well, I thought I needed that island to find the simplicity and calm I was looking for.  I didn’t think I could find it here, in this strange part of South Florida, living with my mother.  The truth though, I did find it and I know now how to create that image wherever the animals and I may end up.  And in an effort of honesty, I did find my island, it just took me a few months to realize (and a few trips to Google Maps) where I was for the community that I work on, Deerfield Beach, is very much so an island.  After careful consideration, maybe that image of perfection isn’t quite as cookie cutter as you once believed it to be.  I didn’t make it to the island I thought I needed to be on but I did get to one, and I made it mine.