sum of deez dings

Some of these things—these dreams—I dreamt when I was practically a child. High school, college, you know?

These things I’ve been carrying around on my back, from town to town, job to job, each new face I meet. I haven’t really examined them since I first dreamt them.

I haven’t really dug under the surface and asked: Why? Why this? Why this for me?

It’s not a bad goal. Not a bad aspiration. But does it feel good on me still, decades later?

God, I’m almost forty and still doodling ideas I made when I pierced my own nose over the course of three hours—not even straight—in the middle of the night with a sewing needle and a post earring from Claire’s.

And maybe that is what I’ve been mistaking for destiny all these years: a girl alone at night, trying to make herself into someone.

So now I feel it’s time to take inventory, really tally it up, and ask: What do I want?

Not the “I” I swore I was forever and a day ago, but the “I” I am now. The one who lived all that life.

What does that woman—the almost-forty woman, in her second marriage, name on the mortgage, fucking paid-off car—want?

What does she want?

It’s peace. It’s freedom. It’s peace.

It’s not being tied forever to who I was for a minute.