Unfinished Endings

It's been a long day, new semester, new students, too many portfolios to grade, too many worries about household expenses and health concerns, lost friends, new relationships, and I was bone tired when I came home tonight. Now it's late and I cannot sleep. I'd like to believe that this too, is just a symptom, a side effect of stress. The world is moving too fast these days and it's been too long since I've turned to the pen, my blog.

I don't quite know who I am anymore.

The girl I was when I moved here ten years ago has all but disappeared. There was so much I wanted then, and those things haven't gone away, just been pushed aside for more practical purposes. The whimsical workshops, classes in jewelry making and gourmet cooking replaced by workshops to certify for ELL trainings. Weekends in a little trailer by the seaside replaced by luxury vacations in Hawaii, Vegas, and Arizona. Tiptoeing around a house that was never mine, fighting for every inch of space, only to have three floors to call my own now. I remember dancing around my kitchen late at night with the cat in my arms, and then my daughter. Now they both have grown up, grown independent from me. I swirled around a universe with many stars , gathering them all close to me, and I've let many of them go, friends of ten years have fallen into that black hole of space.

It surprises me to see what I've become, a mother, a teacher, a girlfriend, a daughter, a neighbor, a friend...but there were so many possibilities. What happens to the unfinished endings? Do they drift floating in limbo, just waiting for someone to finish them up or do they dissolve, like salt crystals in seawater. There are threads hanging from every life, and my mother always told me not to pull them, for fear of unraveling the entire piece. Somedays I would like to take the scissors and cut them off, searing the edges, but that would be too easy.

Yes, that would be too easy.