A Clean Slate.

Today, I stayed home and went through my desk, which is coincidentally where I'm sitting typing this all out right now. For years this desk has been my dumping ground of sorts, for anything and everything without a place. Textbooks, other books, random papers, trinkets. You get the idea. Never once in the four years that I've had this desk have I used it for its real purpose: work. Well, writing. So here I am.

Like I said, I cleaned it out. I hadn't really sat down and done so since the day Graham "disappeared" back in the fall of 2010. I opened all the doors and cabinets and drawers in it and pulled everything out, setting it on the floor in front of me. In three hours, I read through journal after journal, paper after paper of things I'd written, most going back to seventh and eighth grade. A couple as far back as sixth. The most recent was from freshman year, my creative writing class. Out of everything I had held onto, everything I'd written from my past that at one time meant a great deal to me, I filled two trashbags to the brim, one being so full that it very nearly fell apart. All that's left is a relatively thin folder of things from my fangirl days, my creative writing class work, the six word memoir contest entries from junior year, a few other pieces, some photos, and my university acceptance letters. Everything else I had no use for anymore. I mean, some of what I threw out I'd already typed up some time ago, so I have it on my laptop. But most of the other parts of it were things I had no reason to hang on to anymore. They were all things from when I was with Graham, starting from my guilt during the first summer of TIP all the way through my suicidal phase during the break-up. And as I was reading through it all, wondering why I still had it, I remembered what I'd been thinking the last time I had done so three years ago: I thought he was coming back. I thought that if I got rid of him from my desk, and thus my life, then he'd never "come home" (I actually wrote that in them; how embarrassing). I thought that if he did take me back, I'd want to have the writing and memories associated with our past together. Well, he's gone. Been gone for almost three years now. We had good and bad times, but it's over. I laughed at a LOT of what I wrote today, more out of embarrassment and shame than humor, but it was laughter nonetheless. Then I threw it in the trashbag. That part of my life was just that: a part. A relatively small part. I stopped letting it dictate things I did a long time ago, and it's time to get rid of it all (sans the rose stained glass piece his mom made because it's just too pretty). I'll track down the box my mom has somewhere of the stuff from us together (what I never got to burning) and get rid of all that, too.

Which in a way brings me to TJ. Like I said before, we're together through the summer, but that's it. No long distance. And that means a closing of that chapter in our lives. Yes, he's my high school sweetheart, so I'm naturally going to keep quite a bit of the things he's given me over the years, but it'll stay here in Florida. When I go to college, it's time to move on. I'm not the girl I was when we met four years ago; I'm not the same girl from when we got together two and half years back. And he's certainly not the same ROTC kid from freshman and sophomore year. We've grown and changed, and now it's off to our separate universities, separate cities. It's over. If we find our way back to each other in the years and years to come, then I'll say it's fate, but I don't know that right now. All I know is that now is not our time.

Segway to Ian. Clearly "now" isn't our time either. Not long distance. We'll see what happens if and when we bump into each other on campus. Maybe we'll start over. Maybe we'll just be friends. Or maybe we won't be anything at all. In any case, anything can happen, but we both have to be open to that, which means putting aside the past. By putting aside the past (unfortunately, the good as well as the bad), only then can we go forward.

What's important here is nothing is set in stone right now. As my mother likes to keep reminding me, I could end up in a halo from a car wreck and be unable to attend Rochester in the fall. Any number of things could happen to compromise the parts of the future that I think are fairly certain. Something that took a ridiculously long time for me to figure out, accept, and put into practice is to always keep an open mind about everything. I can't possibly know all there is about every little thing before I try it, so why judge it? Why live my life in a box of ideas that were parented into me when this is my life now? For the first time, I can make whatever decision I want and not have to worry about repercussions [that involve my parents (I'm fully aware of what's legal and what's not)]. However, that also means that I can't blame my parents for how I think or what I do anymore (like I really could before). Because, as I said, it is my life. I'm fully accountable for what happens in it now. I'm lucky to have the chance at a clean slate; maybe this time I'll scribe something worthwhile.

11 weeks before move-in day, so I'm in this wish-washy period before being an official undergraduate but just after graduating high school. Nothing to do, relatively no commitments. Kinda breaks my heart and decreases my sanity to know this is my first summer in 5 years without any kind of academic program where I get to leave for awhile. So I'm home for 77 more days with only Netflix and online shopping to comfort me. But I am done with high school, and this was only a high school memoir, so that means TTFN: Ta Ta For Now. I'll be taking a break from blogging for the remainder of the summer, so check out my links up top there. Very active on Tumblr and Twitter. But "Story of a Girl" ends here.

It's been real, guys. Over 3,000 views. Heartache, heartbreak, insanity, pain, happiness, growth, strength, failure, and a whole four years (okay really three years worth of posts) of everything in between. I bid thee adieu.

Love always,
Caitlyn