Breakdown

It's 1 am on Saturday night. I'm alone in my apartment. And I just had a bit of an emotional breakdown. Just for a few minutes. But it happened. And I think I needed it.

There's a lot going on right now.  Most pressing is that in the next 14 days I have to either let my current landlord know I'll be leaving here for at least another year, or that I'm peace-ing out by October 31. Most stressful is that I have the biggest paper of my life due in less than 3 months.  Most sad is that as I write this my mother is in Connecticut, sitting at the bedside of her older sister, who is dying.

I went and looked at an apartment today, seeing what my options are in my quest to move out of my current neighborhood, which is....loud. Too loud for me, at least.  I unexpectedly have a chance to move, which I thought I wouldn't have until at least a year from now, and so I set out to see if maybe I actually can.  The apartment that I saw today was...okay.  I think it's maybe a little bigger than my current place. Maybe. But it's definitely not as nice.  It would be quieter (probably) than my current place. But it's not as nice of an apartment.  This didn't really hit me until I was back here and realized---I have a NICE apartment. It's small, and this building is kind of dirty, and I really do hate this street, but.... My actual apartment? These 4 walls and huge bathroom that I get to call my own? Really. Fucking. Nice.  This was never so clear to me as it was after seeing that other apartment today.

Huh.

So I'm sitting here, dazedly realizing that I probably am going to stay here for another year, as much as I bemoan my neighbors, and this street, and this neighborhood, and even though I just sold my car today so that I would have the money to move (also so that I would no longer have the headache of paying to have a car in New York)...and I start wandering around my little space, thinking about the things that I can do that I've been putting off, that I should really just DO if I'm gonna be here awhile. I looked at empty shelf space that could be filled with clutter-turned-thing-in-its-proper-place, and absent-mindedly went through one such pile.  I found a photo envelope with pictures in it that I'd forgotten I'd had printed before I moved in.  Pictures of my parents and my brother.  I had never taken them out of the envelope, had let them get buried in a pile of office supplies.  I looked at each of them for a long time, and felt...suddenly, and strongly, and all at once, sad, lost, alone, regretful.

I realized that I miss them. That I would like to see them, as much as I often feel that I don’t, really.  I marveled at how happy my parents look in that picture from their trip to New York a few years ago. How much my brother and I look alike--how that is still true, despite the years and years of pain and misunderstanding between us.  I cried for how far away from them I feel, how far away from them I am, how that’s exactly what I intended, and how it turns out it actually hurts a bit, to get what you want.  I felt a deep and sharp loss that startled me, and made me think of my mother, spending the weekend with her older sister, her sister who is slowly, yet quickly, dying of cancer.  How this is the…fifth (?) loss like this that she has endured. And how I can only guess at the pain she is in, and how I might never really know what she is going through, and how sad I am for her.  And I cried for my mother, and the fact that it took this long for me to realize how sad I am for her, losing another person she loves.  And I cried that she won’t let me in to her real life, her emotional life...and how I learned from her.

And then my tears were about all of my own fears and doubts and worries, that I apparently don’t let myself really feel as often as I think I do. Because it all came slamming through tonight.  And it hurts.  Life hurts.

I imagine you know what I mean.