Badlands

I know how she probably felt.  I, too once found myself trapped in a life that was not my own.  A life that was given to me by circumstance and misplaced desire.  A life that was really, really good.  Good is all that most of us can even hope to ask for in an existence right? And really, really good? Well, that doesn't happen all that often, and when it does, one would think that the person to whom the universe bestowed that elusive really, really good life would sit back and shut up and let life happen to them, seeing as it's really, really good and what not.  One would think.

I left New York years ago.  First a little at a time, and then all at once.  My mind left the city before my body had a chance to catch up, and when it finally did I found myself halfway across the states with limited belongings and no regrets.  It's fun to blow your life up, at least for a time. You think: If nothing matters, somehow everything matters much more.  But then...

You start to realize that everything you encounter on your eat-pray-love, counter-cultural soul-searching journey doesn't fit neatly into the clichéd platitudes that you've muttered to yourself while aimlessly gazing out of a train window.  No, everything does not matter more when nothing matters.  No, the absence of society isn't the most profound society there is.  You eventually find that you're hopelessly pretentious, sickeningly romantic, and irreparably (at least for the time being) economically separated from the wistful life that you dreamed up in your head when you decided that you were all too comfortable in a life that people would kill and die for.

But I get it.  I get why she did it.  I did it too.  I didn't chase a man, but I sure as hell left one, and that's not all that different.  But as I read the account of her exploits in the Los Angeles Times while sipping a gin and tonic prepared by someone who is paid to like me, sitting on the veranda of a sprawling mission revival-style estate in Orange County, what has ultimately changed since I ordered that same drink in a dive bar thirty minutes from my Upper West Side townhouse?  The company, to be sure.  But I'm not even all that sure.  Anyway, the casual observer would say I landed on my feet, whatever that means. I guess so did Holly.