Tic-Toc

            The clock has been ticking. But I think that this might be the first time that it's ticking loud enough that I can actually kind of hear it. 19 days. I feel like I need to do something crazy and spontaneous before I go. (If you don't know me, crazy and spontaneous are for sure not on my profile description and when explaining my idiosyncrasies, no one would ever think to put those words to me. We don't complement each other, let's say.) I don't know what to do with myself. I leave in three weeks but I already want to start packing my bags. One of my closest friends, Chloe, (the dark haired one) left this morning at 6:15 am FOR GERMANY.

     Not last night but the night before, I slept over at her house after her going-away-bonfire-party. We had a really nice night! Lots of eating and taking pictures and playing dare games and watching people embarrass themselves and shit like that. After everyone left, we went downstairs to her room and well...    It looked like this:

   And her suitcase... (note that this is about 30 hours before her plane leaves) Looked like this:

               

(I'm kidding) It really looked like this:
             

(I'm not kidding) So point being, she wasn't packed. So I spent the night sorting, throwing away, folding, and packing her clothes while she cleared her room out. I will not have this happen to me. I expect to be completely packed and have everything I need sorted and ready one week in advance. Heck, I already have everything ready and you don't even know how tempted I am to start packing...
You see, the average teenage brain looks basically like this:
                                    
And I feel like mine normally looks more like this:
                          

***COUGH COUGH OCD***.... Ehem...  Anyways. This week I'm getting everything that I will need together. I have a medium sized list of things that I still need/would like to get. People who have already studied abroad keep telling me to pack verryyy light because not only will you shop until you quite literally drop upon your arrival to your host country, you will also come home with about 16X the amount of things(clothes, food, nick-knacks, orphans... etc.) that you brought with you. So I'm really really really trying not to add too many things to the pile but it's unbelievably hard to pack two suitcases for an entire year of your  life. Like, seriously.
     Well, this will not only be on here, my normal blog, but It will also be the... (drum roll please....) Very first post on my study abroad blog!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes, that's right. I have officially started a study abroad blog. And seeing how infrequently I post here on this ol' normal blog, well I sure hope that I will find the time to post on that one when I am living in Italia. I will try my very best to keep up with it weekly but I don't think you'll be seeing much of me around THESE parts no more... (these parts meaning this blog) So, I'll miss you.

Talk to y'all soon, I guess. Over there at: http://tessameetsworld.blogspot.com/

Tessa

Lonely

   I hate the word lonely. When I say it, especially when referring to myself, I feel so pathetic.
"I'm lonely."   Gross.
Who wants to hang out with a lonely person? Nobody.
I feel like all of the people I love most are in the wrong places because they're too out-of-reach. And all the people who think that I love them most are in the wrong places because they're too on-hand and there. And the people that think that I love them the most think that I think they love me the most but don't. And I know that they don't. They don't love me at all. They just like me.
 The people who I love the most love me. I miss those people.
I'm lonely. There. I said it. You know why? Because I've surrounded myself with people that I don't love and when I do that I feel alone. I feel straight in a gay bar because even if people like me there, they couldn't actually love me if they tried and even if I loved them, it would be hopeless and embarrassing. So I don't try. So I leave. So I'm left alone. So I'm lonely. 
I used to think that if you didn't have friends or family you were lonely. That only if you were literally ALONE, then you were lonely. Now I'm experiencing a type of abandoned-only-by-my-own-species-lonely. Which in some ways is worse because being a puppy left alone in a room with only lions is less fun then just being an alone puppy.
My mother says "it will all work out". Luckily my mother is, without fail, always right, so...

I guess we'll see.

Life Is Good

It's been a good while since I've written last. Two months? Two and a half? A LOT has happened. It's summer vacation and I'm free at last from Asheville for hopefully forever.
  Everything for next year is set. My visa is ready to go, i have my calling cards and pins and blazer...shoo, I'm a foreign exchange student. This past weekend, I attending a Rotary Youth exchange orientation and I've learned everything that I could possibly be curious about for next year twice over. I feel so prepared that I could leave as soon as I could get packed and Ohhhhhh lord I'm ready.  

   

In the past five weeks of summer, I have done the following:

• Spent four weeks being a camp counselor at Camp Celo, a super cool outdoorsy kids camp (That you should definitely check out whether you're a kid, parent, teen, or young adult.) where I met some pretty dang amazing people and had more fun than I could have asked for. 

• Spent some quality time with my awesome friend Vinessa whom was a counselor with me at Celo and took some impromptu pictures in the river arts district...

• Spent another day with my friend Simon and his family to welcome him home from his trip to South Korea...

• And so much more that I don't have the patients to list.

Anyways, thus far....AWESOME SUMMER. Next stop... New York. I'm going to a lake called Big Wolf in the Adirondacks in Upstate. We stay in a lake house there every summer and It's so much fun. I keep getting flash backs of last year....

After that, California and then..........................

ITALYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

^Cremona, IT

So happy right now. While I was at school, I was constantly in a place of unhappiness. There was some sort of conflict going on socially, or emotionally, or with school stuff... Now I'm finding myself to be at a peak of happiness even in the dullest of moments. 

Insomniac

 These past few nights I've gotten less than sleep despite my ongoing efforts to get more than sleep. I've gone to "bed" no later than 9:45 for the past three nights in order to catch up from the weekend and have managed to actually sleep about 4 hours. I don't know why, but I've been sleeping in really shallow waters. Usually when I can't sleep at night, (which happens rarely, but it does sometimes happen) it's because I'm thinking. I've had an eventful day or something really significant has happened to me and I just can't keep my brain shut off. Usually when this happens; when I can't fall asleep due to conversation after song after bad news playing on repeat in my brain, I try to visualize all of those things in one location. I put them all on a windshield and only focus on the back and forth motion of the windshield wiper washing each one of those things away. I used to always use this when I couldn't fall asleep as a child. Or when my mother attempted to get me to meditate with her and all I could thing about was the candy I was never given. The problem with this tactic: Candy smears. And I would imagine when placed on a windshield and wiped across glass it would smear undoubtedly. So that became the flaw in this strategy. I would get rid of the bulk but was left with the crumbs which is almost worse. 

That hasn't been what's been happening though. It's really been like I'm just walking ankle deep in warm water which always raises goosebumps along the rest of your surface. I'm tired and I'm trying and no matter how obsessively I change my bed sheets for comfort it's not working, gosh-darnit. 

Sometimes I wish I could go back to being a child. Where the most simple thing of a mobile would keep the Z's coming or in my case a white Gauss canopy. I couldn't sleep without it. It was like a princess' bug net for bad dreams. It kept out the monsters and the slimy things perched underneath my bed because it was too pleasant for them. Too soft. 

I'm just not tired at all now. Maybe it's from all those caffinated cups of tea this morning. I drink tea when it rains because it gives me an excuse to sit on the porch and watch it rain without worrying about what I should be doing. I should be sleeping.

Hairlines-- An Angsty Memoir

“She’s ten, ten going on twenty.”

My naïve father was still convinced that this corny and awkward conversation starter would make any listener elbow the person next to them and say “good one, huh?” with no sarcasm.

I would look way up; confused as to if I was supposed to say something then. I would stand there, watched by whoever my dad had managed to drag over and attempt to make me their favorite little girl. By default, I would lift the thin edges of my corduroy or velvet or cotton dress, and trip over my feet to make my way to the back of his or my mother’s legs, hidden in safety from all of those people who were so much taller than me.

I used to think of adults as trees; towering, huge poles, suspended by only their own will power, overlooking the world in a way that us kids just couldn’t. We were mere flowers, innocent and looking the other animals in the eye. The grown-ups were the out of place ones, only able to see and interact with each other unless they felt like getting down on one knee and finding an exasperating grass stain on their work pants. As a child I could never comprehend why we were smaller. We were clearly smarter, cooler, prettier, and obviously deserving. As my perspective changed, it was almost as if some of the wiring in my brain completely un-plugged itself and it seemed I was all out of electrical tape.

In literally no time all, I went through some significant physical changes: my blond hair grew darker, my skinny waist skinnier, and above all, I ROCKETED in height. I became one of those trees before any of my friends had become holly bushes. At first, I thought that height gave me power. Gave me…authority; and it actually did. As a child I was looked up to mentally AND physically. New friends thought I was older and therefore, more mature which was now something cool, not weird. But as the wires in my head began to unplug themselves, I began to think of things a little different.

The main issue was this: I didn’t want more authority than my other friends. It was fun for a while, but then I realized that just like Ariel in The Little Mermaid who wanted to be human, I wanted to be recognized as myself rather than, “a very tall young girl”. Just like how the average pregnant teenager is referred to as “that pregnant teenager”, I felt as though I was a stand-out object instead of a stand-out individual.

I spent long nights awake in bed, clutching my sheets, resorting to fetal position in result of excruciatingly painful growing pains. I couldn’t help but pity myself; a child prodigy of something I couldn’t control and just didn’t want.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“She’s fifteen, fifteen going on fifty” I bet you can guess whose hopeful voice conveys this dramatic overstatement to a random person.

My father is an antiquarian of memories. He collects things because he’s afraid that everyone else will forget that it’s important unless it’s kept in a storage warehouse. He fears being alone with his own memories and nostalgia. He winks instead of saying hello which started scaring my female friends when they became teenagers. My father starts twitching before he starts crying, and starts speaking and doing before he starts thinking. He has salt-and-pepper-hair and wore high wasted jeans and wife-beater tank tops when he was dashing and in his twenties. He tried and tries so hard to help me overcome my fear of being different. He used to take me to the beach.

When you go to the beach, there are barnacle covered binoculars on the docks. If you put a quarter in a pair, the binoculars turn on and you can look out along the savory liquid glass, collapsing onto itself, you can watch the bird’s smooth glide along the warm ocean winds. You can watch the world from the perspective of two marble sized circles and the lingering smell of seaweed. This was how my growing up became. Not the seaweed or the marble sized circles, but it was like watching a family of pelicans up high in the wind. So high you have to crane your neck forward to watch them, and then having to dramatically jerk your head down when the birds take their fast dive into the water to scoop up a mouthful of jumping fish. The change of perspective happened so fast and was such a new, strange sensation, that it was almost frightening. I’m not ready. I’m not ready at age fifteen to look down at my own mother.

At this point, I have become Waldo on a page of black. An obsolete comment in a silent hall full of people, a whale at the Nature center. People see me from miles away while I watch hairlines. Dark brown, black, red, light brown, blond, white with little specks of dark brown at the roots, blue, sometimes green, short, long, gone. You look me in stomach, I look you in the hair line, that’s just how it is.

As a little girl, I was basically the epitome of cliché. I dreamt of being a princess and driving a red coverable buggy. I liked kittens more than breathing and breathing more than mushrooms. A devastating fact for me growing up was realizing that high heels, (pink to match my dress, of course) weren’t really going to be an option. The obsession started with Cinderella and her glass slipper. (I never understood why it was called a “slipper” when clearly it was a stiletto.) I dreamed of dropping my own glass stiletto at a magical ball, only to be discovered by the most hansom prince in the whole town who comes to find me because we fell in love at first glance.

I remember when I was ten or eleven or so, watching all of those good cop-bad cop movies with the irresistibly sexy female lead who secretly carried a gun in her guarder. That scene that painstakingly replayed itself in my mind: Limo. Red carpet. Two men get out and squint at the paparazzi’s flash cameras. Pause. Anticipation. Red stiletto. Flawless. One foot out. Pause. Anticipation. Gorgeous. And then cue the loud music as she struts her way to the entry of the building, man at each hip. This scene would be nothing with out the shoes. Is the idea that I stood by.

Several years later, when I realized how far the pelicans had dove down into that water and how fast, I noticed that I would never, ever get away with shoes like that. So my corrupted and self conscious little self started dreaming a little different. Underground shoes, for women who are just too tall. I imaged bulldozing my way through life, making a path everywhere I go, walking below everyone so that I could look others in the eye. They would be fashionable, of course. Practical. Life savers. Killers. I wasn’t comfortable with whom I was, and so I lay in bed at night devising schemes to kill that person and become someone else.

Sanity at a standstill, my own mind has been degrading me more than anyone else for the majority of my “of the charts” life. The wires have been cut. The wires have been cut and I’m making amends with those pelicans that have caused my neck a little bit of pain. I’ve embraced my inner Waldo, sung my obsolete comment in the silent hall, and nobody can stop me from being Cinderella if I want to be. Because she’s walking into this one barefoot.  

CHANGE And The Lists That Come With It.

In a situation where one might leave their comfort zone, where one might step outside of that place that they have built their dam, step significantly far for the first step, one might grieve. Or one might pretend not to grieve but in reality, they're grieving more than they've ever grieved before. When I leave this place, this place that I have chosen put all of my trust and love into, of course I'll grieve.I'm enthralled. Avid even.I'm so excited to step out of my world and experience another for a change because well, I've got a case of xenophilia and I honestly don't see that going anywhere.I'll likely love it. Maybe even choose to stay for a second year, a third... But for now. I'll grieve; and I'm okay with that. Maybe grief is too intense of a word. Nobody's dying or leaving forever(I hope) and I am SO excited. But I am scared.

•  I'm scared of scary people following me around.
•  I'm scared of leaving my mother and step-dad for a year.(I''m sure they'll enjoy a break, but if not for their sake then for mine. My mother gets me through everything.)
• I'm scared that when I come back Asheville will have become either Los Angeles or Kansas and I really don't like either of those places.
• I'm scared that I'll get attached to people there and it will hurt so bad to leave them.
• I'm scared of leaving the people here that I'm already attached to and it will hurt so bad to leave them. (even for just a year or two.)
• I'm scared that they'll be too academically lenient on me and I'll have a hard time adjusting back into whatever school I'll be at in senior year.
• I'm scared that I'll sit around in my room all day blogging and anxiously making lists because well, that's what I do when I'm anxious.

Not only do I have commitment issues, I also have a problem with change which is one reason why I'm trying to completely submerge myself in it.CHANGE. A terrifying thing that takes a whole lot of practice. I know, I know. I'm starting pretty drastically. I mean. A different country drastically. But still. Something I am usually good at is taking a risk, and I love an adventure. So what the heck. Here I come. 

(I love old maps.)