The very first day I moved to Boston, July 5th if you must know, I told myself I needed a pack of colored pencils.
It’s one of those items that I must’ve always had access to in my life.
My parents have lived in my childhood home for almost 30 years. In those 30 years, items have accumulated, inbred, and then nested in bins in countless pieces of furniture that have storage. The whole of human existence can be found in that house, but you may spend hours looking for it.
Because of the shear volume of items in that house, if I wanted colored pencils growing up I would simply ask myself a few questions: do I want the off-brand colored pencils in the garage cubbies that hold excess school supplies? Do I want to go into the basement and look at the art studio section of the basement where decades old art supplies from my dead grandmother live? As well as a mountain of old craft kits for children. Or I could go into my room where I had bins of school supplies from yearly, semesterly replenishments, and find several nearly intact packs of colored pencils? Or I could go to my sister’s room and go into her bin of school supplies that she has furnished over the years from the previously mentioned sources.
Abundance. But abundance at a price. There were so many options in that home, it became paralyzing. And after I’d opt to bring some more colored pencils in from the stash outside, forgetting that I already had enough pencils under my bed, I’d add them to the collection of things in my room, and suddenly the abundance of items became suffocating. I rarely had a good nights sleep in my childhood room. I was haunted by the amount of stuff in my room, in my house, on the planet, and I couldn’t sleep. One of the worst nights of sleep I ever had was the night that I realized that in all the things of my house, I had lost the password to my Webkinz account. It is important to note that I hadn’t used that account in a over a year when I had that thought, it wasn’t as if something that was actively important to me had been lost. It was the idea that in all that existed, I had forgotten something that I once cared about, and the realization that I would have that feeling more and more often as I grew up. I was 10.
In college, I studied theatre. I had colored pencils as a part of my curriculum. I wasn’t much of an artist, either in visual or theatre arts. And by the end of college I was so depressed that I spent the next year in grad school trying to forget that I had ever not been in grad school. I never wanted colored pencils. I wanted to drink with my friends. And date guys while convincing my best friend he was in love with me. Then after I convinced him, I spent my time connecting with him, connecting with other people, expanding the world that had become so small when I was studying theatre.
With graduation came a job and a new city and the new need to assert my humanity outside of a job. This was a completely foreign feeling to me. I felt like the part in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where the monster lives in an abandoned hut in the Swiss alps and watches a family. This one family and the books he finds in the hunt– Paradise Lost, Plutarch, and Goethe– and tries to become a human from that information alone. No matter how many articles on The Cut I looked at, or trendy memoirs of trendy girls I read, or account I followed on Instagram, I felt like the monster being chased out of town with pitchforks.
I spent all my time listening to audiobooks, I started trying to discover my style– mostly through looking at pinterest and you will be shocked to know that it just left me feeling more depressed, and I wanted to start drawing. Drawing was going to be a way for me to somehow unlock my inner desires. Find the truest parts of myself that words cannot describe. But I needed colored pencils and blank un-lined paper. When out after work I would say to myself, “oh I should find some” yet, I never found the agency to actually stop in a store that I knew would have them. I also convinced myself that a CVS I was already in would at least have some Crayolas. They never did.
That’s how I found myself almost 6 months in Boston with no colored pencils, no clear desires, and a blog that no one reads.
I host parties that only invited people show up to. I have two pieces of plastic Tupperware in the fridge with moldy food. There is a chance I throw them out under the justification that I prefer glass containers better. I eat too much one day, eat too little the next citing a “stomach ache”, and eat too much the next. I listen to podcasts that I’m embarrassed I listen to. And I don’t know how to be a human in the city. All I want is to feel like there is a part of me that is known in this city. I want to buy colored pencils at an indie art supply store, while I’m there see a poster for some event, go to said event, become the belle of ball, and become part of some ‘scene’, become infamous, become a hostess where people pretend they’re invited to my parties just to feel like they’re apart of something: we’re all phonies, we’re all lying, we all think our lives are going nowhere, we’re all 6 years away from moving to the suburbs.
Maybe I should just get a prescription for Wellbutrin, read “Bowling Alone”, and slowly fill up my house with things.