Grime

There are moments when I find myself very “down in the dumps.” I’ll be really shoveling it up down there, you know? I’m just digging a hole and throwing the dirt up and over - covering myself in grimy, nasty filth. I’ll have been getting too many rude looks from people that day or I find myself wandering around an area that isn’t very pleasant or I get flustered and indecisive and I feel like whatever choice I make next will be the wrong one. I just put myself in a bad place. It happens.

But then I realize how completely ridiculous I’m being. Not for having these feelings necessarily, because it’s perfectly normal for humans to have human feelings, but what I realize, and what I really don’t understand, is how am I allowing myself to complain about this unbelievable life I have the privilege to be living. I am thousands of miles from where I grew up, filling my mind and heart with faces and places I never thought would become more than a memory of a dream or a sketched out fantasy. I am doing what makes me happy. How many people get to say that about what they do every day? Why am I letting a couple of frowns, or an empty stomach, or a plethora of activities that I have no time for, jeopardize my happiness?

So I leave my room, where I’m cowering over my laptop, furiously typing into Google “CAN YOU PLEASE MAKE UP MY MIND FOR ME?,” and I take myself to a pub. I fill my tummy up with fish and beer and cake, I grimace at the exchange rate of GBP to USD, and I take a deep breath. I smile at everyone on my way back to the hostel, regardless of their own attitudes, I put a skip in my step, and when I get back to the room, I sit down on my bed, laptop in lap (where it belongs), and I made a goddamn decision - because what use is it to me to be spending my valuable time trying to make everything perfect when the only person I have to please is myself? 

I meet the new girls that have just arrived, filling the three excess beds with their baggage, and I have a gleeful chat with them about the struggles of finding accommodation and activities that coincide. 

I suggest to them, “Maybe you should go get a bite to eat. Think it over. Drink a couple beers - I know it helps me. Hell, I certainly wouldn’t be talking this much, otherwise!”

I laugh. They laugh. And everything’s okay.