all I know is this:

Dear Portland, I’ve been what you could call distant.  You could even say cold, closed off, bitter, depressed, wallowing unnecessarily.  I didn’t even tell you when I came home!  Perhaps even bitchy-whiny would be accurate?  It’s not that I don’t love you, Portland, it’s certainly not that you can’t fulfill me or fix the hole in my center.  If I could heal my heart anywhere, surely it would be here, in the green.  In a place so un harsh.  I can travel all over you and find places to call home, can be comforted by the life that exists only here where other places only wither and freeze in the winter and nothing is left but yellowed grass and snow crusted roadside turnouts.  Ah, but Portland, don’t you see that I fell in love with those places too.  I found a home under a roof of stars in night skies so clear all year round that the thought of being overwhelmed by the bowl of the sky and the utter darkness around you would be the most beautiful way to go.  Would be a welcome way to go.  There, in the small places, in the open where the water in the air around you freezes instantly and sparkles in front of your very eyes, like diamonds in the night air.  That place of extremes, of harsh life, so unlike your comfort, Portland.  Oh Portland, your trails that I have run, the water so sweet that the rest of the country should be so lucky to ever taste you, with people so different and so alike.  Where rain is so varied that it becomes a ridiculous joke.  Portland, you are incomparable.  It is not that I do not love you, and you have always offered a home for me.  It is that I cannot see the sky.  It is that I left my heart out in the cold, under the stars that are so clear and so bright and so many that I would be happy to die there.  It is that I left my heart there and came here without it and I do not know how to grow a new one, not yet.  For I will always love you, Portland, but in my haste to run to you, to run away, I left my heart behind, and I do not know what to do without the starry sky.

I’ve been feeling a lot of … frustration, lately.  A fair portion of it is my own insecurities and doubts about what is going on in my life.  And when two important people in my world (my dad and the boy), separately and without knowledge of the other both suggested that I write to get it all out of my circular-running traintrack of a mind, I followed their advice.  I haven’t written nearly enough in the past while, haven’t taken advantage of this blog as I know I can.  It seems tedious to me at first, but I know that they are right, to a certain degree.  Writing helps. 

I hate whining.  Ugh.

I picked up and left home 10 months ago, because i was miserable more than anything, for a lot of reasons.  Over my work, over my life, over a boy most of all.  My friends were the sole thing that kept me going, and they all remember what I was like last January through April.  One of them kidnapped me (quite literally) and stole me away to Seattle for a long weekend in late January just to jolt me out of misery.  I cut my hair off to my ears, the shortest it’s been since I was 8 years old, and I applied to a job in a National Park in the least populated state in the Nation.  All because I felt caught in a rut, in a particular current or eddy and if I didn’t get out of it soon… I just don’t know.

It’s coming back around again.  Maybe it’s the time of the year, maybe I’m not trying hard enough to see the good, but it’s February now in a whole new year and I’m unhappy all over again.  I can’t figure it, either.  I like my job well enough, the pay is good, the location, these mountains that drew me out here in the first place are as gorgeous as ever.  I have a boyfriend that I love, and regardless of if he ever uses that word in the near future, I know that he cares about me as much as I care about him. 

I wish I could figure it out. Hormones? Relationship doubt? Restless energy?  I haven’t a clue.  Maybe a little of all of it. 

I don’t know what the next season brings.  And trying to get the boy to think about the future, just into this next year, and whether it includes me is like trying to pull a sheet of cloth through a screen, one thread at a time.  Not his fault, his knee is fucked and it’s effecting his entire decision making process.  If his knee is good, he’ll do one thing.  If his knew is still weak, it’ll be something else.  And like it or not, I think mostly about where he’ll be when making decisions for summer season.

I also moved in with these amazing girls, a dose of estrogen (and not the cat lady kind that I was living with before) is exactly what I needed in my life.  If I stay with the job I have, which I’m not sure how much I like it, I stay in town and continue living with the girls, low rent and decent people, not a bad way to do things until September or October of 2012. 

If I don’t stay with this job it becomes a matter of: What?  Go back into the park, work minimum wage, live in a dorm until fall and that season ends and then somewhere new.  Or back to Portland and find a job, when there are so few in the first place.  Or on to somewhere entirely new as soon as May.  Biggest question: do I do everything in my power to guarantee that I can stay with the boy, or do I keep that out of my priorities and focus entirely on myself?

I hate being that girl.  But part of me, the defensive part, says it’s not wrong to want to stay with him if I can, especially if right now at this time in my life I don’t have strong ties to anywhere.  I won’t go places or do things that I don’t want to do with my life just for him, but I feel strongly enough about him that one of the most important things to me is keeping him in my life.

I don’t know if this job is really worth staying with.  It’s experience, it’s consistency, it could be more than seasonal.  If I like living here and working here enough. 

The biggest problem is that I don’t know what I want.  From my life, from my job, from where I live.  I need I figure out what I want.  Not the easiest thing in the world.