The field on the St. John's River
05:45:05 | 2001-03-06
I went to the river Sunday. I had just gotten in from school, and after unpacking my car, (and hearing my mother calling me to wash dishes that I had not even used) I decided to take a trip to the river front. I ended up at Memorial Park (if you are familiar with Jax, it's the one with the big statue of the angel over the globe) and watched the seagulls float over the water. It was very windy, but calm.
I had never felt so craddled. I wanted to lie back and sleep there on the bench, watching the birds, feeling the wind around me. I moved around to the edge of the water, watching the waves batter the rocks below me. I could see dolphins out on the horizon playing. I could smell the salt from the ocean nearby, and I remembered how I would sit at the edge of the football field during highschool games, late at night, and watch the river under the stars. How the light would be so bright behind me, and I could see where it ended out over the water. It was like the light was reaching, straining over the river to the other side.
I found myself driving all the way over to my highschool. The gradeschool in front was holding late Sunday mass, so I had to weed through the crowd to get to the highschool parking lot. I walked over to the sport complex, and the gate was locked. I climbed the fence, navigated the barbed wire, (which for the first time I actually got cut trying to get over, I guess I am not as graceful as I used to be) and walked around the track.
Nothing had changed. Everything was still well groomed, perfect green grass with the school emblem printed in red and white in the middle of the field.
It's funny how you can change so much over such a short period of time. I remember how much I hated being there. I was the only poor student out of 1600 that were there. I didnt have a car, I didnt have a cell phone, I didnt have a computer. I didnt have a boyfriend, I didnt live in a gated community, my parents were not doctors or lawyers or CEO's, or college professors.
I look at all of things around me and all I can remember is how unhappy I was. And now I realize how bitter and envious I was. Perhaps I really didnt like it there because I was jealous. I think most of the time I was unhappy because I hated being jealous. I couldnt change my situation, and being jealous made no sense. I knew all of this, and still I behaved irrationally. I realize now that all of it was my fault.
But something else hit me at that point. None of the people that I called my friends ever made it any easier. They ridiculed and ostracized me, and that only gave me time to be jealous of them. Not of things that they had, but the power that came with it. I didnt care that I didnt have a cell phone, it was what I couldnt do because I didnt have one. Where I couldnt go because I didnt have a car. I think I was jealous of the freedom they had, not the objects or the money. And I had to have it waved in my face for four years before I could finally have my own freedom.
Now that I have my freedom, I smile for my past self, the one who suffered for four years. I smile because I never did while I was there. I smile because I am free to do what I want and I dont have to punish myself anymore. I smile because all of those rich snots know that I wasnt rich and I got accepted to a better school, and I dont live at home with my parents. ^_^