perhaps.

much like relationships, life happens when you stop trying to make it happen. when you stop looking for it.

I am surrendering to the tide. I will be washed away with it as it comes and I intend to be ready. where ever it ill take me, I will allow it.

hanging out with a bunch of twenty year olds with 13 year old kids is refreshing and interesting all the same. oh, the perspective! It reminds me how easy life used to be. when did I make it so complicated? at what age do we stop being so spontaneous? when does it stop being simple and just so easy? I didn’t realize it had become sticky until I watched myself hang out with them and see how easy everything is. like, why not? why not go by the seat of your pants? yeah, exactly. why not?

through the pits of my wallowing rises a desire to live. I find the burning anxiety again to be in the hills. I find thrill at the though of travel. at the thought of a strangers river trip. I am alive and this world is mine, now through a different set of eyes with a long past. I can live my life however my heart desires.

I try to remove myself from the relationship. I want to be in it with my thought and mind, but I don’t want it to be a passive rut. I want to choose to be in it, I want to choose to spend time with James. I want to choose to have dreams. I want to choose things. I am separating myself from being a part of someone else. I am not good at being a part of someone else. I want this someone else to be a part f my life, but not of me.

I am excited to proceed.

I came back. it’s like I am in mourning. it takes me days, weeks, if not a month to be back to normal. to feel comfortable again and to be ok with my life as I know it here. it’s like someone died and I am trying to hold on to their memory. desperately hanging on to the morsels that I was able to bring back with me. desperately never wanting to let go, but it happens no matter how much I fight. I live too much in the moment where ever I go, I can’t hang on.

then surely, as always, they fade into memory and fade into some distant double life I lead. in some other life. some other time. some days it seems like a dream, that distant home of mine. and so I have regrets. fighting the fall into depression. and the blame. I am blaming myself for leaving finland, and I am blaming myself for not being able to leave here. I blame myself for staying away from finland, and I blame myself for being gone too long from here, I blame myself for leaving, I blame myself for coming back. I blame myself for not living my life the way I want to.

*sigh*

I want to be free. I want to leave. I want to travel. I want to move to Missoula for a few months. I want so many more things, all the time, but I am starting to feel like I can’t make choices for myself because I am in a relationship. I can’t stop myself and stay in one place. it’s hard and it’s making me depressed. I am want to get in my car and drive. I want to leave. I want to drive. I want to be free.

I don’t know how to stop. part of me thinks that stopping is settling. like suddenly I would look around me and go “is that all there was?”

I want to keep moving forward. I can’t stay in bozeman. I have an itch. I scream for something, for someone. I am falling. I see myself slipping. I have been slipping for a while, but I can’t talk about it anymore, I have to run.

as much as I love this country, it also drives me insane. the people do, they always have. from a pretty early age I have always struggled against these you must and you must not’s. there’s a huge list of rules in this country. some of them are written and there’s a long list of officials governing these rules and enforcing them. often they are also left for each petty officials personal interpretation and often you might get completely different denials based on that personal interpretation. but most often than not, what you get is denials. and you apply and re-apply. but everyone, in any role, job or position wants to be as petty and nit picky as possible.

it’s in the foundation of this culture. there must be rules. and if there aren’t, surely, what ever you are about to do is forbidden somewhere or somehow. after all…. there are rules. the people here, even the most lenient of the rule followers are very stuck in their mold. everything here, in the daily life, reflects the insane amount of obedience towards some kind of a rule. there’s a constant assumption that there must be a rule against it. ans there’s a constant worry about breaking those rules.

spending a month here gets me so exhausted over the worry and rule following. I find it extremely tiring. I don’t bother to worry about such things, I never much have. even if they are not rules of the bureaucracy they are following, it’s some unspoken cultural law that is in effect. like you can’t put grandma’s doilies onto a rustic table cause they don’t fit the design style. by who’s rules? Finnish people are so stuck in a square box and they are too scared to even sniff into a different direction. in fact, they have a hard time to think outside of the box because they have been hammered with these rules and being afraid of breaking some kind of a rule.

me. coming from the united states have a hard time watching all this. I mean, who cares? why be so concerned with what some stranger thinks of you? like being afraid of talking cause someone might understand. why should we care if someone over hears our conversation?

I wish they could see sometimes how truly silly their rules are.