shiny like the promises in magazines
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
just empty promises
Rebecca McNutt
Two days ago it happened. Again. I awoke from unrestful sleep, sleep interrupted by my middle aged bladder; interrupted by Atticus, one of my cats, climbing the shelves in my office and pushing aside my treasured toys along the way; ultimately, interrupted by emotions I was too tired to name and too unwillingly to define. I awoke and felt the pull of the road, the pull of other places, other people, other things; I awoke and felt the push from this home toward one I do not know and cannot as yet name.
I spent that day, two days ago, sad, deeply so, and turned inward, though my job is all about interface and connections. It was hard. Almost too hard. So I played Mereba’s song “Get Free” on repeat for hours it seemed, thinking in unison with her voice:
“When the water’s rushing up your neck
And the ground leaves your feet
Look around and see what you’ve got left
Did you get free?
Not trying to get by,
I’m trying to get free.”
I need to get free and my wanderlust tells me that I will find whatever it is my heart seeks somewhere else. But this is far from my first rodeo. I have done this so many times: from Chicago to Athens, Georgia to Detroit to Athens to Atlanta to Vegas to Chicago to Oklahoma City to Chicago to Vegas to Chicago. I have followed after something new as if the new would be “shiny like the promises in magazines.” I have done this before. I will do it again, in hopes that this go-round what I find is not “just empty promises” like the empty calories of the comfort food I seek when my heart is as it is, but rather I will find that which I have always sought. Me–in better form.