Complicated...

Day has long since turned to night and the wild blue yonder is dark. City lights flicker in the distance, a sparkle of hope to prove that the world is still there, and I fly east through the darkness, to a home I already miss.

My tears have left me though, replaced instead with a static melancholy that proves to me over and over, that this is, indeed, real. My days in the Windy City are numbered and soon, two weeks before I turn twenty-nine, this Midwest cowboy will saddle up and ride south. I will say goodbye to a city and a lake and a tower and stiffen up my upper lip while trying to deny my emotion, and turn my back on Chicago.

And part of me is angry. Or maybe not angry, maybe just frustrated. Frustrated that I will again go through a life changing event, a turning point, a defining occurrence, unaccompanied and alone. I’m frustrated to walk all the way out of my comfort zone with nothing but my bare knuckles to protect me. And maybe, when I think of my life without its most integral components, when I think about not seeing the sun part through the skyscrapers in the morning, I find that maybe, just maybe, I’m scared.

I’ve done things in my life that were scary, or unbelievably hard, and I’ve done things when I’ve been terrified. I possess the ability to push through my fear, to accept it, to use it as a stepping stone towards success but it doesn’t make the anticipation of the unknown any easier. What it does, though, what it does is make me miss things. And people. And times and places and moments. It makes me long for romance and passionate kisses and ex girlfriends and times in life when having a pair of familiar eyes to look into solves all of it’s problems…if only for a moment.

Robin Thicke performs inside my head, his voice giving life to words I could have written myself. “I wish I could lose, all of my blues, I wish I could stop putting my blues on you, I wish I could love, like nobody loves, I wish that my goods outweigh my bads enough…but I’m too complicated.”

I’m too complicated.

Because even though the sounds of the El train rock me to sleep under the glow of the city lights, inevitably, before the sun decides to shine the next morning, I find myself in the back of a Towncar heading towards O’Hare. I watch the city below me grow smaller with each vertical foot and I’m left with feelings of, “I wish I would have…” and “I really should have…” I think back to the days when I first came out of rehab, when the frozen city listened to the sound of my hollow footsteps. I walked the streets alone, thinking, wishing, hoping, hurting and praying that the valleys would pass and the peaks would once again come. I would stare at Lake and stand still while it stared back at me with its bluish hue, looking incomprehensible in infinite vastness.

I once again look towards the future and realize that doing so is futile. I cannot see past what is right in front of me and it’s possible that if I could, I wouldn’t really want to.

“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others...for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.” - Albert Einstein