(before you start reading, try to turn on the song playing on my mySpace page – “Heart In A Cage” by the Strokes – I wrote this blog while listening to it and it helped me with my writing pace..if that makes sense to anyone…lol)
Here I sit in this apartment. It’s only my 2nd home ever. I guess I’m staying up late to take advantage of it. I’m not sure how many more late nights I’ll have here (in this apartment or NJ for that matter). So I’m sitting here thinking of the short time I’ve spent here.
I moved in around October 2004, after my 26 year stint in Richland, NJ. It was pretty easy at the time. I had a new girlfriend and I was falling in love – that kind of bliss can take your mind off of anything, yet slowly towards the end of 2004 and into 2005 I started to feel lonely here…I wasn’t alone, but I was lonely inside.
If you look back at some of my older blogs you might catch some hints into this “depression”. I wouldn’t necessarily call it that but I went through a lot of feelings in this past year in this place. I had some late night panic attacks – the worst were in the summer…some of them were triggered when I was watching SFU and getting over emotional, others were just from the god damned heat in this place. Other times I would just wake up here in the middle of the night and feel really alone. In my old house I never really felt that, I guess I had some built in “securities” there.
Either way I managed through 2004 and into 2005. I got stronger as the days went by and I accepted this place for what it is. New Jersey has a lot of depression in it for me. Whenever I come back here from other places I have slowly realized it in my life. There are tons of people and places I love about NJ, but overall there’s something about it that I can’t take anymore and I know longer wish to face. I feel I’ve lived through it and I’ve overcome the bullshit that this place emits – stuff powerful enough to take some people down. I’m so sick and tired of the backwards thinking and closed minded people here. Maybe I’ll learn that it’s like that everywhere, but there’s got to be someplace better than here. Sometimes when I leave my apartment I feel like Marty in Back to the Future walking around in the 1950′s version of the Hill Valley. I leave all this technology and walk out into the cold and I look around and I’m thinking, where the fuck am I? Am I this disconnected from the town I live in? Perhaps it’s just me…
My apartment though..this house..I’ll miss it. I’ll miss the way the lights shine into my kitchen when I walked in there when the sun was down. I’ll miss the light on my bathroom mirror and the way it makes my skin look in the mirror. I’ll miss the cemetary down the road and that 1 minute walk to wawa. I’ll miss my lonely walks around this town, contemplating life. I’ll miss the memories that me and Jackie have created here…seeing her red car pull up in the street, seeing her smile when she arrived all the way from DE, the time I fell asleep and she was locked out and started driving back to DE…(Jackie, I’m still sorry about that).
There isn’t enough I could write about my time in NJ. It has defined me as a person more than anything else in my life (not counting people though). There isn’t enough I could ever write to tell you how much it means to me.
Yet I’m ready to go…I’m ready to leave it behind and start a new life, because that kind of opportunity doesn’t come around everyday. I could choose to stay here…but I’ve always promised myself that I wouldn’t die in New Jersey…no, I won’t die here.
drained
