iPhone Alarm
iPhone alarm. Wake up.
Why is that sound so rattling every time? I always mean to change it, but I never do.
I blink my eyes open. I remember one time, my best friend told me sometimes she wakes up by violently opening her eyes—destroying her slumber from lying like a wooden plank on her back. Like just the reminder of being alive is unsettling.
It is jolting to hear motorists and angry horns from your bedroom window at 7 AM. It never ceases to amaze me when I hear of people born and raised in this concrete jungle. The local city folk can call me a transient or floater all they want. I theorize part of their anger stems from the inability to leave. How funny and amusing it is that people like myself and my roommates imagine moving to the city of dreams, stay up late watching our favorite comfort shows such as Sex and the City or Friends, and yet some generational locals, pushed to peripheral boroughs, feel frustrated because they can’t seem to get away from it.
Last week, the National Grid gas technician decided to make small talk with me while his counterpart, who wreaked of moldy laundry - or some stench unknown, fiddled with our stove. It took me five or so hours of phone calls and classic on-hold music to finally get these guys to grant us hot water and gas, so I took it upon myself to watch their every move. Anyways, he spoke in a heavy New York accent and described his dream of moving to a farm one day. He moved to Pennsylvania once, but he only lasted a year before returning. I wondered to myself: how did this guy get to be a gas technician? Where did he grow up and what was it like? What was the energy like in the spaces he moved through? How does he think and what does he think about?
Then, in typical human selfishness, I wondered about myself—a very typical thing I do. Maybe that’s why I primarily write about myself. I wondered what I’d be, where I’d end up, and what spaces I’d occupy or find myself in.
Two months ago, I graduated from a college in the mountains. I regularly taught yoga at a lovely, kind local studio. Soon, I’ll be working a sales job at a Fortune 250 company in a luxurious office far above the underground trains and tunnels of Penn Station with 360 views of one of the world’s biggest cities. Will I fit in there? Do I fit in here?
The winter always brings out a weird side of me. I feel bogged down, apathetic, and bored as well as reflective and introverted. Life’s seasons never cease to surprise me though.
The grass is always greener for me, and I always think I can find better grass. That’s why I’m a free spirit. A floater, like the ones appearing in my contacts lately. I dream and dream and dream, then life passes me by. Sometimes I feel like I’m watching it on a screen. I think some might call it “always striving for perfection,” but it can be exhausting.
Like the gas technician, one of my dreams is to own a ranch or farm somewhere. There’s something about farms and the idea of getting away from it all. Montana has an odd appeal, but I wonder if I’d enjoy it because the weather seems so frigid. I want to own a fully sustainable ranch like the one Zac Efron visited in his new Netflix debut series. When I close my eyes, I can imagine my hands in the dirt, brushing by green, happy plants. In this dream, I don’t care what I look like. My hair is in braids and my freckles are fully on display. A glance around the ranch will show you animals of all shapes and sizes. They’re happy, too. Maybe I host animal yoga or therapeutic retreats. Living in this city cannot be sustainable for life—you’re so far from roots: the evolutionary and the plant kind.
