So here I am, in the Twin Cities, for the first time in a fucking year, as much as I did not at all expect to happen, I am having a wonderful amazing happy-ing time.

Last night I was in St. Paul, laughing around a table reviewing the events of our lives since we were fourteen or fifteen. Talking smack about everyones life direction everyones incestuous nature with each other everyones fun and glee and mayhem.

I drank a bottle of wine only to come home to my step-dad milling about with nice liquor and nothing to do. Four rounds of Tequila shots and matching amount of beers later, I have convinced him to come outside and smoke a cigarette with me, which he has been explicitly banned from doing for at least the last fifteen years. Seventeen-year-old brother comes home at some point, I then drag him outside, give him a sloppy mentoring speech of which I do not remember a thing,
tumble off to bed, wake up to Thanksgiving.

This is the first Thanksgiving I have had at home in years, and it is nice. Mom bursts into tears because for once her family is all together. My sister and I color the turkey in the special Thanksgiving Day Newspaper, we hang it on the fridge. My relatives stay well into the night drinking and gambling. I sneak off to see New Moon, when I return Brother A calls Bella a Ho and talks about Brother B's weed quality in front of my grandparents. I sneak off to the basement to watch children's movies and drink nice beer and avoid the loud ramblings about how I should join in the horse race game.

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I guess the thing is I thought I would be sad today, I thought I would drown myself in the sort of nostalgia I usually like to obsess over, tinklings of Ben Folds in the background as was so inspired by yesterday's 6pm-and-drunk-sing-a-long.

The thing is, my parents are trying to move to Blaine (VOMIT), they are trying to sell the house and they want to get rid of all my stuff they have in storage and so they are making me look through my childhood things and pick what is to be saved.

I have barely gotten started, but I did open the box of scrapbooks albums and other such things, from a collection of I-Zone Sticky Film circa 8th grade, to my Senior Experience portfolio. It was all there.

What I was most in love with was my very first scrawl-all-over-it book, a black spellbound thing from my final year at Mounds View High School. It is amazing what can come out of the brain of a seventeen-year-old on drugs. The creativity was impressive and the work I didn't remember, I wonder what happened to this part of myself and where i get it back. Lyrical little stories and a drawing of a lover as a child with a bouquet. Musings and questions, photos of paintings, and (my favorite part:), multiple notes summoning me immediately to the office to discuss my truancy issue.

What was perfect about my life when I was seventeen was that I was stark-raving-mad and I had all the time and space in the world to explore it, as I saw things. My future held a forest and an onslaught of love, and painting on the backroom walls were all I could do to keep at least some of me from drifting off to NeverNeverLand.





What happened to this part of myself and where do I get it back.