Heart

"How could you falter,
when you're the Roc of Gilbralter,
I had to get off the boat so I could walk on water" -Jay Z

I keep having a reoccurring dream where I'm pushing the break pedal but the car would not stop. I'm skidding from red light to red light, not at high speed, I haven't hurt anyone but I've been close, gliding past red lights, one after another, no matter how hard I push. Ironic, I still haven't attempted to get my license; I might never.

Speaking of cars, my mother drove me up at 5:30 this morning. My dear grandmother, woke up at 5 and wanted to take her granddaughter up to what she views as inadequate living conditions. Playing in the car was this lovely Vietnamese melody, a sort of passionate, beautiful, surreal kind of love song; I wasn't sure what was going over me last night and this morning but I had a feeling in the gut of my stomach that the insecurities and feelings suppressed were floating to surface.

There were cars driving North for what seemed like hours or days and it felt like they had no destination. They may be dropping merchandise from other towns and states, and once that's done, they head back, it's a circulating system of heading back and forth on a lonely highway where the only organisms present are the trees lining the highway in a parallel manner that teases them about the world that awaits beyond those points. I think about men spending their days on the road and how lonely that might be.

I got my first headline on the front page today. A story of a boy in need of a heart transplant; I always thought I would rejoice on the day I got the frontpage, especially as an intern, I never imagined that would happen. I got a couple congratulations, a couple of phone calls wanting to help the family, but strange enough, being too involved in the story, having to change it because of logistics, getting the credit for simply writing the words describing the hardships someone else is living with is disheartening. This story is not about me. This story is not about the Sun Journal, or the Sun Journal selling papers. The unfortunate realization is that this child is likely going to pass away and this is my breakout story.

I would love to embrace the idea that I'm helping or that I'm giving voice to those who do feel helpless but even within that story, in little Central Maine, objectivity and political correctness is hard on me.

The stories are a gift; interns don't typically get a chance to do that. I suppose living on one's own is a sacrifice for it, I feel like I'm missing a huge chance of building friendships back at home by being here. Once a person is on her own, her insecurities are the only voice she hears and there's not much here that works to dispute it.

There are things you have to do to assure that you get where you're supposed to in life, but being 21 in a strange town, as a female with no affection or connections around, I suppose it takes more than I had anticipated.

I re-met someone this Saturday that somewhat caught me off guard. Many people on facebook chat and not one interests me. I suppose a combination of cars (which always made me sad for some reason, well I know the reason but no one else does), the thoughts circle around the idea that it's hard to make an impression on me- I've been intrigued by maybe 4 or 5 people I've met in my lifetime. There may be a hundred people I care for but only a handful who stop me with their intelligence or wit or aura. Yet these cars, they seem to be moving -skidding past red lights in a different direction. I suppose there won't ever be an accident that way but never a clash, a test, a chance either.