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2002-02-20 - 7:30 p.m.
All right, I just have to say it. If you are reading my diary on a regular basis you need to put me on your favorites list. I am just vain enough to want to be on everybody's favorite list. Just humor me. That's all I ask. And now for todays entry.
Today as I lit my tenth or so cigarette for the day I caught myself falling in reverie, longing for the days of the past when my friends and I would steal cigarette butts from ashtrays and sit behind the phone company and smoke them. Then my memory went further back in my smoking history to the time when my group of neighborhood friends and I would collect dried grass after we mowed our lawns and roll it in newspaper and smoke it like it was a cigarette. Then I remember the time we found a whole pack of cigarettes on the ground at a football game, how we smoked every cigarette in that pack over the course of a week. And then I remember how I yearned for the future, to be eighteen so I could buy my own cigarettes. When I did turn eighteen was I happy and content that I was finally old enough to buy them? No. Then I just started yearning to be 21 so I could buy my own beer. And now that I am 28 I yearn for the times when I was nineteen and sitting in parking lots on campus seducing men into buying me a fifth of Southern Comfort. When I did turn 21 was I finally happy and content? No. Then I just started yearning for the time that I finished college, had a career and a family.What I am getting at is that I can't figure out at which point I stopped yearning for the future and started yearning for the past? In all these great memories I have I was just a girl looking forward to the future. And this is my future, my future is looking into the past and being sad that I am not there. It's all so confusing. Why can't we all just be happy and content with today? I guess it makes it easier for me to appreciate today when I realize that the person I was in the past was really quite unhappy. Even in a state of unhappiness and unease those memories became my happy memories. Which means someday I will look back on today with longing, even though today I am quite unhappy. I now have two goals, the first I am not telling and the second is to try to appreciate today so I will someday not be confused when I am yearning for it and wondering how I could have been so unhappy when I had it all. |
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