Walk

The exercise path I walk is about three or four miles around.

I say walk figuratively because I don’t physically walk it – I roll.  It is not in my neighborhood or in my area but I make it the center of many of the reasons why I go to it.  To get fresh air, to see calming sights, to see people.  It is in an affluent area two cities from mine and I aspire to it.  I let it be known that I will have a nice condo there one day, close to the mall and shopping and the bus lines.

The fresh air I go to breathe there is also breathed by the affluent I hope to hob nob with one day.  Whereas these outings for me are about being amongst them and their wealth, they for the most part are about their exercise and well being. I smile politely as they jog, the scent of their clean sweat and sunscreen perplexing to my nostrils.  Often I see their nannies, brown like me, pushing their alabaster skinned, sun screened babies.  I smile at them too – the nannies and the babies.

I don’t want to be there for them – the affluent I hope to hob nob with, but for myself.  There is a part of me that always feels like I don’t belong anywhere.  And since with the wealthy is a place I have not yet been, I look on them and their sky high, glass homes, as a place that maybe I can belong.

I fully realize that this could all be a fallacy – that once I reach my ascribed destination that I could feel like I don’t belong there either.  So I peer into their botoxed faces and their children’s unmarred by life innocence for any assurance that I could be wrong.  But all I see are blank stares looking past me.  I vow in those moments to not be like those rich people, but to be different, to be kind, to be open and welcoming.  And then I remember how forgiving my heart can be and I lament how my as yet had fortunes would be spent trying to save the world or by being conned from it.

I sigh in resignation and continue my walk, taking in the slightly salty bay air.  I feel free here, like the sky is the limit and that only my Self could ever limit me.  I glance ahead and realize that I am almost to the end of the trail and all of a sudden, I don’t want to go home.  I don’t want to board the bus and take the 30 or so minute ride back to my area.  So I hope i just missed my bus or I try to think of an errand I need to run.  But my bus is right in front of me and anyway, there is no errand left undone, so I board.  And head home.Home is where the walls feel like they are in talks to suffocate me and where I feel the safest – all at the same time.  Home is where I am hidden and hiding and reaching out from.  Home is where I find myself not living the fullest of my life and waiting for my living to begin.  Home confuses me.

Confuses because I love and hate it.  Many of my dreams have been born here and have also died.  Half the time I am not sure what to think or do.  So I’ve been sitting, real, real still.  Hoping that I don’t implode or fade away.  Waiting, for what I am not sure.  Content and eager for something better or more.

Out on that walking path everything is always so clear – except how I will earn my fortunes that will support me in those glass houses.  That part always brings me back to the reality of what I have and how not so bad it is.  Until I realize that it is not how I pictured my life being.  I get sad and think back to all those people I passed on the walking path and wonder if any of their sad eyes noticed how sad my eyes were too.

-S