Let’s Get Away From It All

Oh please, can we? I’m so tired, I’m so bored. I wake up every morning and look out my window to the same snow-blanketed street and I drive to work and nobody looks happy, they mostly just look puffy and pale.

Just take me away. Kidnap me from my routine, get me out. We can go anywhere, eat cheap Chinese out of the carton and sit on the beach even if it’s cold. I need to hear the ocean. For a girl who grew up surrounded by flat prairie, the ocean is endlessly wonderful, shocking in its size and power. I have always appreciated watching the sky hit the ground.

Let’s get away from it all.

I want you to come back and look around my tiny room, a jumble of sequined dresses falling off their handers, perfume bottles and lipsticks and Virgin Mary candles gathering dust, bras hanging from thumbtacks on the walls, and I want you to remember why you loved me: my books in their messy piles, my unmade bed, the way I fidget and sigh in my sleep, the warmed-up fragments of perfume at the back of my neck. You loved me once and you could do it again.

I am battling my boredom, wishing to be swept off my feet somewhere warmer. It never happens. My days go by in exactly the same way: alarm at 8:30, coffee, out the door by 9:20, open the store at 10. It’s crushingly boring. I am crushingly boring by proxy.

I lost my magic. I think it took off one night, looked at my sleeping form and thought, “Well, nice to know you, but I’m out!” And it took a vacation in another girl’s body. It was bored of me, so it left. I don’t know how to get it back. Perhaps you can help. I was magical when you were around.

I used to be magical. People had often told me so. I felt the seeds of my magic growing when I was a small child, sparkling and taking root in my fingers and toes.

You can lose your magic in all sorts of ways. You can lose it to other people. Some of them will steal it gently, so gently you don’t notice. Some of them will throttle it out of you. Your heart can crack open and spill magic all over the street.

I never thought I would feel so apathetic, so lost, by 26. I thought I would have things figured out by now, that I would’ve met a man who I couldn’t breathe without, who would live with me in a big old farmhouse somewhere with our wild little flock of children and rooms full of books, where the dogs slept in patches of sunlight and the radio was always playing on low. I thought I would know what I wanted out of my life by now, that I would know where my heart was, where I was supposed to go. I thought at 26 I would be a real adult woman with a career and a mature heart, not the kind of girl who sees her ex-boyfriend and his perfect, pretty new girlfriend at a bar and immediately runs away.

I thought I could write the life I wanted and it would materialize out of the crystal clear.

I need help figuring it out. I’ve never felt quite this adrift before. I awoke on my second morning of age 26 and I was terrified. I know I have to do it all myself, make my big grand moves on my own, and that’s scary. At the end of the day, I have to save myself. I have to stop waiting for a white horse and a sunset and a Taylor Swift ending.

So let’s get away from it all, find a little apartment somewhere where nobody knows my name. Take me away; is it such a big deal for someone to hold my hand for awhile? I want to feel excited about something again, I want to feel warm and exhausted with promise. Let’s get away from it all, start over. Sometimes I’ll go a little crazy, but I promise I’ll sing when I wash the floors.