Roots

There’s stuff I learned this summer that I could probably spend a few paragraphs talking about, but at this point I’ve forgotten all about Enterprise and moved on to the other issues this summer presented. The most important being my first broken heart. 

     My first broken heart did not derive in the way most do, because I have never been and do not plan on being in love anytime soon (Problem #1: Boys are a tricky creature and Problem #2: Vulnerability just doesn’t sound like something I would be into). My first broken heart accompanied my realization that my childhood best friends and I have fallen out of best friendship.  It hit me in the shower one morning, after the last night I slept over at Carrie’s. Something felt off the whole time, but nothing was out of place. A cloud of nostalgia was engulfing my conscious and I was loosing my ability to think clearly about my life, as I do when I think too hard, too much, and too often. I was in the shower when it hit me, and I’ve never sobbed harder in my life.

     There is something so fragile about friendships. In the way that they are strong and hard and undeniably reliable, they are also built on trust and time and hope that when we say forever, we mean it. Mine were built on pre-k rugs, on performance hall stages, and on softball diamonds. And after a while, they were built merely on the years that had come before. But I’ve learned that mutual experiences are only strong enough to seal a bond when they remain the only experiences. An air-tight sort of ordeal.

     I thought nothing could weaken a 14-year friendship. I genuinely thought that we would four-way Skype everyday and text each other everything and meet all each other’s new friends. That’s on me. Somewhere in the middle of new friends and frat basements or between college course work and a part-time job, I lost touch. I hardly called home and I never texted. I don’t even know my Skype password anymore. We grew apart, and I for that I take full responsibility.    

     But as we grew apart, we grew up and we grew into the people we are supposed to be. We found the new people who will break our hearts as we leave them for the next stage of our life. Perhaps we have found the city we will call home for the rest of our life, or we have developed a passion for something we never saw before. It doesn’t matter in which way this growth took us, it just matters that we have grown.  Up and away from the roots that once bound us so close together, we couldn’t see the world we don’t all share rapidly approaching.

      It’s natural. It’s totally natural that we have grown apart and become close with the people we see and talk to everyday. The people we live with. The people who we now have shared experiences with. These are the people who we will introduce our parents to and the ones we will list as our emergency contacts in the years to come. But as much as these people have learned about me, they will never know baby Brenna. They will never begin to understand what I miss so deeply about home. They’ll never watch the sunset at Thatcher or understand just how amazing of a teacher Mr. Guilfoyle was. They will never know the back roads of my neighborhood, and they will never sit on the Middle School lawn on a Saturday morning while we eat blueberry scones and breakfast sandwiches.

     More than the what, it's the who that made me who I am. When I replay the memory reel in my head, they are always there with me. From my earliest memories of dance and softball to the moments before the van drove away for DC. 

     I can single out specific traits and behaviors that I inherited from my parents, specific ways I view the world because my sister viewed them first, the ways in which my college friends have influenced me, even the things that friends I met in high school managed to rub off on me. I cannot identify these things as a result of my childhood best friends. That is how engrained they are in me. We ‘ve been inseparable since I was four, and as a result the ways in which they influenced me are inseparable from the things I find innately my own.  I know for a fact that I would not be who I am today if I did not grow up with those three girls.

     Roots run deep. I am not ignorant of this. But trunks grow pretty damn tall, too. We are not the same, and we will never be the same as we were when our whole world was our little hometown. 

     So we’ve grown apart. We have come into our own and left our high school selves to settle in dust within the yearbook pages. And I don’t know how to end this, because I don’t want it to seem like an ending. I want it to seem like an acceptance. Because I can’t be the only one who felt that heavy pressure, and I can’t be the only one who has been struggling to make sense of the crushing feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I can’t be the only one who misses the people we used to be while simultaneously loving who we have become. This is me coming to terms with the death of a friendship and a life as I knew it, and becoming comfortable with what that means for us moving forward. With me knowing that we may not speak for weeks, even months, at a time. With me knowing that there is someone else in your life who makes you laugh with their ridiculous antics, who listens to Lady Antebellum with you when you’re sad, and who engages you in heated political debates.  And respectfully forces you to listen to her new playlist in the car. That makes it sound like a breakup, but I know it’s not. Because part of me coming to terms with this new kind of long distance, is me knowing that no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I will always have you three in my heart. Because roots run deep, and ours are forever intertwined. 

Change Over Time

     I like my hometown. I really do, I swear. I'm just not overly attached to it. You would think I would be. No place else had ever been home until I went away to school, but no. For as long as I can remember I had sworn off being one of those people who comes back after college. I have no good reason except that I decided it once and it's just never really appealed to me to prolong my time here.  I've slept in the same twin-size been since I outgrew my crib, I've driven along the same roads from my car seat years until I was the one behind the wheel. I could draw you a map of where everything is in Wal-Mart and Hannaford, and let you know which Dunkin is the fastest en route from one end of town to the other. I used to know everything about this place like the back of my hand.
      Spending a year away has made evident just how quickly things can change. There's at least 5 new stores in the mall that I didn't know about. They're building a Taco Bell across from Wendy's and there's a weird elevated square in the middle of the Marshall's parking lot. The library, my library, doesn't use stamp cards anymore for return dates. They switched to receipts - receipts! I was raised on stamp cards. I used to look at the due dates that preceded mine and try to make up stories as to why the person 3 before me returned the book so fast it could be taken out two days later. Was it good? Was it terrible? Did they have to suddenly leave the country? Where did they flee to? What was their crime? It was a fun game. Anyway. Change doesn't bother me. Change is healthy.  It's a sign of life; pulsating progress that moves us to where we should be. I'm all for it. What does bother me is what I didn't realize until I came back: the fact that it can do so without me here.
        When we leave a place, we hold it in our minds as our fondest memories depict it. Our memories don't show us the life that remains here as ours continue elsewhere. We expect that when we return, things will be just as we left them. We don't imagine our most influential teachers have found new pupils to mold. We don't think about how our parents might have settled into a quiet routine that is blissfully free of our shoes in the middle of the kitchen and our dirty dishes in the sink. I never fathomed that the place I hold dearest, the place that has built a rough foundation for the person I have become, would substitute the thick, ink filled manilla slips that provide so much character with flimsy little paper receipts destined for the nearest recycling bin. I was raised here. It's the only world I have ever known. It's my world. My streets, my stores, my high school, my mall, my thruway exit, my neighborhood. All mine.
   
     It is equal parts hurtful and humbling to realize that the people and places so integral to my childhood can carry on so successfully in my absence. I am not this town's world, though it may once have been mine. I'm just another car, another girl, another heartbeat who contributes to the pulsating progress every time she drives away.

The First Year

      It's impossible to know how you have changed without a means of comparison. I mean, you can feel it within yourself, but it cannot be outwardly expressed. You can say you've matured, that you are an adult, that you are more responsible, but in the end it is our actions that determine whether or not this is true.
      I'm a pretty careless driver. I have been since October 1st, 2013 - the day I got my license and discovered freedom. There is no feeling that compares to the first time you drive without a parent or legal driver over the age of 21 in the passenger seat next to you. You are totally in control. You pick the music, the volume, the speed, the direction. All of the power is in your hands. At 16, this realization is the most exciting thing since push-up bras. At 19, it's utterly daunting.
       I've been stewing and thinking and starting and stopping trying to figure out how I am going to articulate to the world what my first year of college was: it took me going on an ice cream run to Stewart's last night to understand for myself.  My first year of college was the slow destruction of my lead foot.  And man did I ever have a lead foot. I never sped intentionally, but I was just prone to putting a little too much pressure on the pedal. Like I said, lead foot. But yesterday I was driving home, a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream riding shot gun, when I got to the hill before my house that I rarely, if ever, drove the speed limit on in high school. It's a HUGE hill, can you blame me?  Usually about half way down I give a quick glance to the speedometer just to make sure I'm not breaking any records or leaving skid marks behind me, and when I did, I was surprised to find that I was going the speed limit. Even more surprised to realize this is not the first time I have noticed this since being home. And then all the fragments of this past year that I have saved as drafts and half written stories came together. This past year had changed something so close to my core that I no longer have a lead foot. Me, lead-footless! It made me less reckless, it gave me goals, it tore down my walls and taught me to communicate with the people I love. It taught me to register the fact that I love people, and they, me.
      This past year grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and forced me to grow up. From the very first night, when my roommate and I awkwardly approached two other girls and gently bullied them into being our friends by making them share their frisbee full of home fries with us because I thought I was going to be friendless, to the first week when I had to get a job all on my own without any connections or references, to the third month when I missed my parents so much it made my gut hurt and I teared up nearly every time I talked to them. I learned that I owe every part of me who ever did anything right and well to them, and that I take them far too for granted. But I never wanted to be the girl that was homesick, and I wasn't homesick - I've never been homesick. My home is where the people I love are. It's hard to miss a place that is scattered across the country, occasionally the world.  Life is about people. This I have learned.
       I found my people this year. I found them asleep four feet away from me, at midnight breakfasts, in elevators, in t-shirts of my favorite bands, in coffee shops, in recruitment shirts, and on the streets of Tenleytown at 3am. These are the people that I surround myself with, every waking moment. These are the people I so badly did not want to leave two weeks ago. They are the reason I will go back.
       They make me laugh until I cry, they know my coffee order, they laugh at my bad jokes, they accept me for my lack of cleanliness and my inability to care for dairy products. They have assessed the severity of my financial incompetence and chosen to keep me around any way. They give me hell and make me want to tear my eyelashes off sometimes, but they make me rational and real. They pull me out of my head: they make me a better person. They give me a reason to go the speed limit.
      When it hit me this year that all of the power was in my hands, I was far less excited than I was three years ago. I wanted to crawl into a hole, burn all documentation that said I was over 18, and call my parents. But at some point I registered a fact that I had always known; there were people in this world, people in my classes, who had been making their own adult decisions since they were 14, some younger. I knew that if they were fine, I would be too.  I saw that I had all the tools I needed to be responsible, I just had to put them into effect. I looked around at my people, how out of sync I had fallen, how off balance I felt. I pulled myself together, pulled my GPA back to it's minimum requirement, and pulled myself back to the center.
        After my first semester, I was too comfortable. I was so confident and so, so happy. I thought that I had found myself, so I didn't need to look anywhere else. Turns out the only place I was looking up my ass, because that's where my head was. It is important to be happy with yourself, and I still am so happy believe me, but life is about people. This is the thing that really forced me to grow up. Life is about people. The people who matter, the ones I don't want to lose. It's about my parents-  living a life that will have my mom telling all her friends about my latest news and doing so in a way that will make my dad proud, in that better-when-it's-hand-written-than-said kind of way. I need to work hard so that I can make enough money to buy my sister the boat I promised her so we can actually spend quality time together as adults (or fake adults because we're never growing up, right?). It's about the friends who stand by while you flounder a bit, but accept you right back when you think you've figured it all out again. If you have anyone, or anything at all that keeps you grounded, don't you dare take it for granted.
   
       Life is about the people who reach deep into your core, and over the course of a few months, a year, a lifetime, chip and corrode and corrupt and deteriorate and destroy your inherent lead foot. My first year of college not only taught me this, but to let them.    
   
   

An Adventurer's Soul

So I submitted a piece to a small annual magazine that has to do with a small lake in Northern New York-- and it's being published! It's not a huge deal because it's a very small publication but I'm very excited and I wanted to share my piece. So here it is:

An Adventurer’s Soul

By Brenna Raffe

The first time I read The Boxcar Children I was in 1^st grade. While everyone else was reading Henry and Mudge and swinging on the tire swing, I was falling madly in love with the idea of living in the woods; of using a nook behind a waterfall as a refrigerator and of cooking dinner on the open fire. And now here I am; living in a city, surrounded by cars and people, where the closest thing to ‘getting back to nature’ I can come is walking the unattended, overgrown pathway that cuts between some apartment buildings. This is where I’ve found myself. Sometimes I feel trapped and sometimes I think if I got any happier my heart might burst. Everything is fleeting.  This, I think, is the burden of longing for adventure.

I’ve never been sure if an adventurer’s soul is born or made, but either way, I’ve always know I have one. Having been born and raised in the same not-that-small-but-small-enough suburban hometown, I never doubted for a moment that there was something greater beyond those town lines, state lines, or even country borders. I crave discovery. But it never used to be for anything overly grand like it is now. It used to be for the simple discovery of the island in the middle of the lake that seemed impossibly far away or the desire to save an earthworm from its impeding doom on the asphalt road; to climb a boulder twice my height and see for miles or to walk out to where the water drops off all by myself.

            As far back as I can remember my family has spent time each summer at Uncle Joe and Aunt Sue’s lake house. It’s more of a cabin, really. Forest colored and lined in full with wood paneling that reverberates the joyous noise of reunion, of family, of summer, of lives being lived. It’s got a bona fide residential attic that stored most of our duffle bags, complete with guest rooms separated by hanging sheets. We ate most of our meals on the screened in porch, listening to the loons call to each other and taking in the view.  Inside, there’s a chill that the fireplace can never quite beat, and a hammock stung up between two pines paralleling the drive.  It sits on hill that once seemed like a mountain and if you let your legs succumb to gravity when you ran down it, there’s just enough lawn to stop before the road. My sister and I used to race down it.* We used to do a lot of things together at the lake. We still do a lot of things together. But as all the kids got older, our time became limited. Weekends were spent on basketball courts and in hotel rooms rather than in the water and around a campfire.

            In those weekends, before time became a commodity highly sought after, I discovered my adventurer’s soul. I found her in the dirt we used to play in and the holes we used to dig in the sand; I found her while we watched the night become illuminated by the ring of bon fires on the 4^th.  She was there as I fell asleep in my dad’s arms watching the fireworks, willing myself not to be scared by the loud booms, but to take comfort in the arms wrapped around me and the way the reverberations kind of made my ribs tickle instead. I found her at the camp store under the lift lid freezer right next to the ice cream and on the road next to me the first time I got to walk down the road and over the bridge without the adults. I found her rocking me in the hammock so hard it flipped over and pushing me the final way on our hike up to the fire tower, straining for the view and the sense of accomplishment. I found her on the boat ride to the island, giddy to explore something new. She hid in between the sparse pines and all around the moss-covered boulders I so boldly used as my playground. She became the voice inside me that, even when my mother told me to be careful, that what I was doing was dangerous, let’s me know I’ll be ok in the end. She taught me to trust myself more than anyone else. In my short 19 years, she’s become my best friend, my most trusted advisor, and often times the one who pushes me to go for whatever crazy plan I’ve conjured up.  She’s the reason I’ve written this, the reason I write at all.

            So I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you Canada Lake for giving the loons a place to live and me a place to wander. Thank you for being a community of adventurer’s souls and fostering one in me. Thank you for giving me somewhere to run wild and free and giving me a sense of what coming together really looks like. Thank you for being the backdrop to reunions that proved strong friendships can’t be broken and for teaching me thunderstorms are breathtakingly beautiful rather than ferocious and frightening. Thank you for the inspiration for the setting of the novel I may never write. Thank you for the ice cream. But most importantly, thank you for the memories. If I ever get so fed up with the world enough to fulfill my childhood fantasy of living in an abandoned boxcar, look for me first on the island. There’s no place I’d rather be. 

                       

* At least I think we did. She says I make up most of my memories. I think my soul knew I wanted to be a writer before my mind did, and it did me a favor and filed away the small, seemingly inconsequential moments so I would have them to write about later.

Silver and Gold

      Friendship can't be define in words. Have you ever tried? It's cliche and stupid and does no one any good ever. Friendship is defined in moments:  It's when Anna and I wake up at the same time on Saturday mornings and one of us climbs into bed with the other and we go from talking about last nights adventures to our friends from home and the times we stay up until 3am trying to explain to each other the shit show that is our extended families.  It's when Adena and I fall into deep conversation about literally anything, anywhere, and somehow always manage to see eye to eye. It's when Greta is having a bad day and really wants cupcakes and even though Emily can't bake for shit, she makes them anyway.  And when Greta let's me crash her solo Dav parties literally all the time because for some inexplicable reason we're both drawn there and even when she's not having a good morning she'll let me sit with her and be weird and loud and probably annoying and she'll even give me pasta later just because.  Leave it to Emily to be the one that let's me be actually straight up mean to her, but gives it right back because we're the sarcastic ones and that's what we do and it's why we love each other.  It's that one night in the beginning of the year when Ben drunkenly told me that he can see us being friends for a long time and how he trusts me with so much and it's really reassuring because I sometimes think I might not actually be as substantial as my mind likes to pretend I am and it's when Jonas will sing country songs way too loud, way too late with me because it's fun and we can and it will piss everyone else off and that's fun too sometimes.  It's when I have a near mental break down because my parents won't answer their phones or texts and I call Emma and she gets out of bed and drives to my house to see if they're there and talks to me the whole time trying not to let me ruin my first night with the other Phi Sig girls.  It's when Katie let's me wear her clothes probably almost everyday even though I usually don't ask and tells me I look ok when I'm freaking out about whether or not my dress is too short or my pants don't fit. It's when other Emma, school Emma, brings me things and doesn't get mad when I'm too lazy to leave the Dav and puts up with all my weird hyper times and even let's me drink more coffee even though I already had a red eye and an iced tea and brings me hot chocolate packets because we're poor and sometimes that 40% discount still leaves the prices a little too steep. It's Maeve's snapchats and constant support and willingness to send me pictures of her dog and knowing when I really need her to send me pictures of her dog and then letting me freak out about her dog for the next 5 minutes and also always responding with "Ok, on my way" when I text her to meet me at Brueggar's in 10 minutes and gossiping with me for hours about anything and everything until one of us has somewhere else to be and being my confidant and advice giver and taking all my neurotics in stride. It's when I can go literally weeks without texting Carrie but as soon as I drunk comment on her Instagram we fall right back into the same routine we've been in since Pre-K and it's when Rachel let's Carrie and I bombard her school friends on social media because she knows we get way too much pleasure trolling the shit out of people on the internet and she's willing to indulge us just one more time, even though she's done it forever and it's probably old. It's the unspoken understanding between Jelley and I that I don't think I can explain but she knows and I know and it's good and it gives me hope and sometimes is the reason I make decisions because I want her to always be able to see me the way she does or did and only she can.  It's the blurred lines from friendship to sisterhood and vice versa.  It's laughter and drunken nights and stolen traffic cones among other various objects and TDR Saturdays and Tuesdays and all the other things in between and it's when they clean my room for me because I'm disgusting and then when they call me on it and I get mad they leave it alone because they know I know. And I need them to know that because I met some other people that I might kinda have some things in common with and spend some time with, those new people will never be them and that everything college is and will be and the person I have become since being here, the person that is more me than I have ever been before, is 212% because of them and their unwavering friendship for a girl they met 6 months ago who is a little too much to handle sometimes and can sometimes lose sight of what is important because she takes them for granted and thinks they'll always be there and I need them to know that if you ever weren't there it would probably break me because everything I am in this world is attributed to those who surrounded me and you all are my oxygen and without you I couldn't breath.

Smells Like Teen Limbo

      It's a funny age, nineteen.  It's like you're hanging in limbo- a legal adult but still technically a teenager. Not to mention nothing cool happens when you turn nineteen. The last three years have accustomed me to reaching milestones like driving or watching R movies without my parents (this doesn't seem too exciting but my parents were very... enthusiastic... about age ratings and following them. I've ruined my fair share of pre-teen slumber parties because the movie selected was PG-13 and I a mere 12).  Eighteen opens the door for a flurry of opportunities to make poor decisions; buy cigarettes, gamble, vote for politicians based on how cool their name sounds and whose commercials annoyed you less. And the years to follow are pretty exciting, too. Twenty is a definitive end to childhood and young adulthood. Your feet have walked this earth for two full decades, a full score if we're being pretentious. And 21 is... well everyone knows what 21 is. And there sits nineteen, smushed between five years of exciting achievements; stuff you get just for breathing everyday.
     But for some reason I'm very excited about nineteen-- more exited than I was for the others. It seems like a year of possibility. The age itself doesn't give you anything, so I feel as if I have the personal obligation to make something cool happen this year all on my own.  There's one really nice thing about having a birthday this close to the new year, and that's that you can pretend the first 10 days of the new year don't actually count and your new year starts when your life actually began. This leaves ample time to finish the Christmas cookies and sit around doing nothing before you begin your New Year's resolution of working out and eating healthier. However, all this free time sitting around doing nothing serves the double purpose of having a lot of time to think about things, which leads to hoping for things that the year might bring.
    For as long as I can remember my parents have played classic rock for my sister and I. I actually think it was less for us than it just happened to be the music they liked, but it made an impact on us. Not only do we like the songs we grew up listening to, but we have discovered other oldies that might not have been introduced to us via parents.  Now, this being said, some think that Elvis is the King.  I think it's Billy Joel.  If you know me well, you know I have an undying passion for Queen, and Mr. Joel is rapidly approaching entrance to the pedestal I hold them on.  I have listened to both Queen's and Billy Joel's greatest hits albums so many times I might have broken iTunes and/or Spotify.  There's something about the classics-- there's a reason why they're classics after all. They represent everything that rock & roll is supposed to be.  You can listen to their songs and hear the heartbeat of an era; everything it wanted or dreamed of-- what it stood for.  If you listen to popular music now, you would think the only thing we're capable of thinking about is big butts and boys.
     So anyway, Billy Joel is the epitome of classic rock (to me, you can argue if you want but I won't care).  But until recently I had never heard, or at least not many times, one of his songs.  Then a few weeks ago it started to play as the back song to a scene in 13 going on 30 (judge me, please, I'm begging). Vienna. And as I listened, the hairs stood up on my neck, because it spoke to me and everything I had decided about my 19th year.
     I had decided I wanted to be a writer. And not just one who dreams of being published but ends up washed up in her mother's basement sad and lonely and a 'broken artist'. I want to be published. I want to take from the inspiration I draw from other authors and dish out some of my own. Maybe there's a starry-eyed kid riding her bike to the library every other day in the summer just to get out more books that I can help by putting myself out there a little. I was told in a high school english class that Bukowski was inspired by Kafka. He even wrote a poem about it. And it made me think about how one person can inspire so many, and if we apply the phone-tree effect, there could be even more.  It might be a stretch, but no Kafka could have meant no Bukowski, and then where would we be?  Now don't get me wrong, I am in no way comparing myself to either of their genius, but sometimes I wonder if my writing could inspire the next great author to finally ink something.  Vienna spoke to me and I'm not really sure why because I'm pretty sure the message I took from is the opposite of what Billy is trying to say.
     Slow down you crazy child, you're so ambitious for a juvenile but then if you're so smart then tell me why are you still so afraid. Where's the fire what's the hurry about? You better cool it down before you burn it out.  You've got so mush to do and only so may hours in a day. But you know that when the truth gets told that you can get what you want or you can just get old.
     There it is. "You can either get what you want or you can just get old". I think I finally realized, after a lifetime of people telling me life is short and I shouldn't waste it, that life is actually extremely short and it's terribly easy to glide through and never accomplish what you intended to or leave a legacy when you go.  It felt like I started high school a year ago and now I'm already knee deep in my second semester of college.  If I'm going to accomplish the things I want to, I need to start working towards them now.  And I need to work hard, because I don't take rejection well and there is an unhealthy amount of it waiting for me if I go down this career path without working my ass off to make anything I write the absolute best it can be.
      This was originally going to be an entry about my bucket list for 19 and 2015 and what not, but that's boring. And if there's one type of author that never gets published, it's the one that plays it safe. I'm done being scared to let people read what I write out of fear of not being good enough, or fear that they won't like it (haters gonna hate, am I right?). I'm done waiting for God to interfere and place me in the lap of a publisher.  I'm done wishing my life was somehow different and not doing anything about it.  It only took me 19 years to get here, but I'm finally ready to take advantage of my time, not waste it away, and somehow make my mark.