merry, quite contrary

only one day left in the cosmopolitan queen city which tourism propoganda usually depicts as this but in reality, at this time of year, the area looks more like this. i love the prairie. i love the big sky. i love being from here. i love telling people that i'm a prairie kid and not from here. and normally, i love being here. it didn't occur to me that there is a reason for my not having come back here in 2.5 years. but this week, as i've been laying low with a cough, i wonder if i've finally outgrown my hometown, but perhaps not outgrown the various pains of the past. how quickly we regress when thrown into the time machine. i'm bluer in my parents' house. and crabbier. i eat way more. and my glamorous habit of lip-picking has quietly revived itself.

i was a relatively smart kid who grew up in relatively warm home. our parents were strict but encouraged lots of activity. i sorta looked like this, though slightly less black. i spent my formative elementary school years at argyle and my wild high school years at sheldon. i studied dance here and was a serious music student (piano and voice) here at the conservatory. i was given my first cigarette by a counsellor at camp ta-wa-si at 13. i got good grades, got busy in lots of extra-curricular stuff, especially vocal jazz. i got to travel a fair bit, got to study french on exchange in paris for a summer. i got to work and earn my own dough starting at a young age. i got braces and a retainer at the end of elementary school, got my tonsils out at 15, and got to wear a shockingly unattractive silver and black getup to grade 12 grad. i got in a lot of shit, but got tons of love. i got pretty much anything i wanted.

so what's the fucking problem? well, when this question was tackled with with therapists years later, so began the unravelling of all the 'gots' to expose what i didn't get, and how all that will continue to bite me in the ass for the rest of my fucking life (um no, not in the fun way).

ok ok, so maybe i brought the sore throat back from my last 24 hours in cuba. and the angsty funk could be attributed to post-cuba blues. the serious heartache is from the missing of friends, ones from my real life and others who are brand new and already special. but these other symptoms, surreptitious, thanks to those environmental and emotional factors, are effectively evaded while living away. now that i'm back at the nest, things about me and my relationship to this place are raw, though hardly clear. triggers embedded in the physical and emotional surroundings are getting me in the ass.

i can't wait til tomorrow, when i fly away home to my own created family. and my evasion. i doubt i'll be back soon. and of course, i have the whole rest of my life to sort out that whole aching ass thing.