I believe that when I wake up in the morning I should be allowed to think one of two things in order to will myself out of bed: (1) I know it’s early, but you’re getting paid today. Remember how broke you are? Oh and those kids are pretty awesome. Get up. Get your coffee. Go to work. -or- (2) You’re not getting paid today and you are broke and constantly worried and terrified of the world, but you got a great night’s sleep and you don’t have to get up for any particular reason. It’s fine if you sleep for another hour.

Today we had a thank you breakfast, of sorts, for one of my jobs. It was from 7:30 to 9:30. This is just late enough that I had no chance of being able to make a substitute teaching job for the day, ruling out option #1. It is also way too damn early for me to feel well-rested, eliminating option #2. I feel that allowing me to sleep in would have been a much better thank you, but the people doing the thanking all have real jobs with serious time constraints, and so we had to work with it.

Of course, I brought it on myself. I drove to Kansas City on Monday night with lion to see Jimmy Eat World. I mentioned earlier, that I have done this before. The day we moved to Jefferson City, we got to our new house at around 7 a.m., after driving from Los Angeles. My mom took a bit of a nap, and then around 3 p.m., she drove Derrik and I to Kansas City. It was also a show hosted by The Buzz and though I can’t be certain it was their Christmas show, it would be a safe bet, because it was almost the exact same time of the year. Different venue, but Jimmy Eat World played then too.

No mother and a different younger sibling, but it’s weird to think about how much things change. Or don’t. I bought the floor tickets, so we didn’t have to beg to get down there. Which is fine, because I’m not as persuasive as my mother. I’m a bit too peculiar to convince adults to do anything, unless that something will involve distancing me from them as simply as possible.

I keep having these moments, though, where I feel like I’m somehow in the exact same place I was seven or eight years ago. Part of it has to do with being home. Part of it has to do with the fact that this town will never fail to leave me feeling vaguely suffocated. It isn’t anyone’s fault, really. I have tried to get around this, and clearly there are plenty of people who find it to be a lovely place. I even understand some of what they see in it. But it feels like a prison to me, and probably always will.

And these deja vu moments contribute significantly to this trapped feeling. I clean out my room and find a CD I made was 14. Then I’m doing my makeup to Avril Lavigne. Suddenly I have to stop myself and wonder what 15-year-old me would have to say about the scene.

At first, I was sure that this trapped-in-time individual would be horrified by it. I hated high school, with the exception of a few wonderful teachers and the handful of friends I acquired senior year that made the whole thing tolerable. My memories of the three years I spent there are a bit clouded, but I know that I lived with a singular purpose: get. out. of. here. The prospect of being back in the same place eight years later probably would have been a fate far less desirable than death.

But then, I have made good on that. I did leave. I went 1,000 miles east to college. I spent four years with people who are incredibly liberal, and probably would have been equally horrified by the fact that my bus driver forced us to listen to Christian talk radio on the ride to school. I went to a place where I had access to an amazing public transportation system and could walk everywhere. I did it.

So I think the real question that Then Me would have for Now Me is this: are you happy?

Before I started to take this big stupid self-indulgent conundrum so seriously, I found it funny. In fact, while belting out Sk8er Boi into my blow dryer, all I could think was, “I just want to go back and hug that girl and promise her that everything is going to be just fine.”

But I’m not sure I’m fine. The thing that caught me off guard in all of this, is the changes in disposition that haven’t happened. Listening to old music and falling into old patterns seems inevitable. I am in a place that is familiar and so familiar habits will return. I think that what would really spook Then Me, is this idea that I haven’t figured anything out yet. I was confused then, of course, because all high school kids are. I was confused and yet sure of myself; I was absolutely certain that leaving here would somehow hold the answer to all of my problems.

What I want to go say to that girl is this: It probably gets better. I don’t really know for sure. You’re going to be sad a lot more. You’re also going to find lots of new things that make you happy. You’re going to take a lot longer to figure all of this out than you wanted. It’s going to be frustrating because you will have lots of amazing friends who are really on their shit. You also have siblings who set an unrealistic bar for you. I’m sorry that’s not what you want to hear, sad and angry 15-year-old girl. But you aren’t doing yourself any favors by trying to place everything into clean little spaces. Here is sad. There is happy. My seven-or-eight years of wisdom have only given me the authority to make two observations on your world-view with the utmost certainty: (1) Happiness will never be encapsulated in a single geographical space, neither will it be irrevocably barred from others. (2) Sometimes things will suck, sometimes things will be awesome, and most of the time they’ll probably just be somewhere in the middle. There is no perpetual bliss. Learn to breathe. You really need to work on that.

And then I realize that this is what I need someone to say to me. Or what I need to say to myself, because I am terrible at taking advice. So maybe that’s alarm-clock-response-option-three: “Hey, it’s morning. It’s another day. Take a deep breath and go figure out if it’ll be any good. Either way, report back around midnight to sleep it off.”