It’s funny. Last night (when I should have been sleeping, of course) the sudden fact that I was Bridget hit me. I had a name, and it meant me. Lately, everything has been moving so fast and so unrealistically that nothing feels real. I have to pinch myself to remind me that I’m a part of this world and should act like it!
I remember when I lived back in Seattle. I miss it. I hated it then. Well, I didn’t exactly hate it, but I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be here. But now I miss a lot of things.
1. The library. And all the books I got there. Sometimes I check out the same ones here that I did there because it reminds me of it. I sometimes got books I wasn’t allowed to, and I kept track of those, because it made me feel rebellious or something. (My dad’s probably going to read this and then I’ll have fun.)
2. Our downstairs. It wasn’t exactly a basement, but it was halfway one. We would sit down there doing homework until 1 in the morning, drinking iced tea (that’s where I got my iced tea addiction – especially pomegranate) and listening to music, usually my radio station, but sometimes 80’s music too. Now whenever I hear those songs I can literally close my eyes and feel like I’m back there. Our mom would come down around 11 pm and say it was just about time to go to bed, and then she would go to bed and we would go to bed a couple of hours later. That was the only time I liked doing my algebra.
3. It sounds crazy, but I liked the rain. I loved it, in fact. I’ve always liked rain. I really liked it when I would wake up in the middle of the night and realize it was raining. I would open my window and a freezing cold gust of wind would rush in on me. I waited a while before I closed it again. I would always drift off dreaming while the window was open. I have a thing for open windows. I like them better than actually being outside. I don’t know why. Then I would hear a creaking inside the house and I would close the window quickly before my parents caught me. It was kind of hard because the windows stuck.
4. When we first moved in and I was fixing up my room, I saw a bunch of beads buried in the carpet and in between the wall and the sideboards. The whole time we lived there, I found things like that. A little fuzzy heart was stuck to the toilet paper holder. I discovered early on, while exploring outside, that we had a treehouse. Our parents didn’t find out about that until a month or two before we moved away.
5. Cable TV. Just one show in particular: Hogan’s Heroes. It was a really funny show about a group of POW’s in Germany, and they kept outsmarting the Kommandant. (German for ‘commander’, I think).
6. The feeling that was there. It was a little depressing, but it was kind of magical too. I know that sounds dumb. But the whole time I was there I felt like if I just closed my eyes hard enough or said just the right thing or reached out just far enough and not too far, I would be transported to some other place. I was so depressed that I was almost crying half the time, but the thing that kept me from losing it was that feeling. It wouldn’t let me stop hoping that there were other worlds I could get to. All I had to do was figure out how to get there. It still keeps me believing. I guess that was my favorite part about being over there.