Damn You, Country Music

You know you've gone off the deep end of P.M.S. when you find yourself FULL ON BAWLING while stuck on I-5 traffic on a Friday afternoon. And it's not the traffics' fault. It's that Trace Adkins singing "You're Gonna Miss This". And you're crying not only because you can relate but because you know that you are only 31 and that you already miss being 8 years old, 12 years old, 17 years old (my favorite), 23 years old, 28 years old, etc. You don't have to wait to be some wizen older woman, reminding youth to slow down. You currently, desperately miss the simplicity of those ages and the stupid things that seems so intensely important.

Frankly, I'm a little ticked that I couldn't just be that dumb bunny thinking that life is about moving on and moving up. Nuh-no. I am the sort that knew while I should be happy in my first dumpy apartment, I should be even more excited to grow up yet here I was sabotaging the present by thinking of the future Erica saying that she missed those old days. Crazy making, right?

Like as I remember sobbing in the hallway of North Valley as Dustin and I patched things up after a little disagreement because I already KNEW that we were going to be together for a long time and this was the simple time and that it was almost over already.

Or as before I left the house I had grown up in, I secretly went to every room and wrote down the details; of how the light came my bedroom window in the morning and made me feel like I was in a movie because it made my stuff so glinty and bright; of how the screen door sounded as it slapped shut; how Riley, my dog, would shake the house as he ran around the porch; or how the buzzer on the stove sounded so blandly but with force. I ran my fingers over the grout in the hall way tile, remembering how my sister and I wiped the tile clean once it was laid. I was happy to move on to a freedom that was new and different and long overdue but I already missed the silence of napping - escape - that was our home for so many years.

I don't have a point in writing this. I suppose it just feels good to recognize that the good times are always happening right now and that we are bound to miss even the crumby times because we don't know how much worse it can get. Until we are there. In rush hour traffic with an empty stomach and an empty tank and a crying little guy in the back seat....See? Missing it already.