and you say, "just be here now, forget about the past, your mask is wearing thin"

I have a summer sublet in Brighton!!! And I even managed to be excited and happy about that, for nearly half an hour. I'm kidding, of course. Not about having the sublet, about only being happy for half an hour. I spent the whole day nervous and keyed up because I was waiting for my future roommate, from whom I am subletting the room, to get back to me. At my parents' virtual insistence I had made a counter-offer to her original plan. My bargaining involved lowering the rent for this month, because I will not be moving in until next week anyway. And I was worried she was going to say no, and tell me she had given the room to someone else, and I was going to have to look for another, inherently lesser sublet. But she said yes, and now starting next week I won't be living with my parents anymore, and I'll start training for a part-time job and continue the urgent search for another, or better still for a full-time job.

Except...

That's the thing of it, really. I'm looking for a full-time job, because I'm willing to take a full-time job in Boston. My father came into my room tonight to have a big talk with me about what I was going to do to justify his helping me out with this sublet. And we ended up transitioning to a talk about the status of my job search in general. And I realized that in that moment I was giving up the ghost. In spite of myself, against my own will, I am giving up the ghost. Because it has been nearly a year and I am too tired to keep fighting.

Its asinine that this is the way the world works. That being grown-up in America means that you have to take whatever job you can get, even if its alone in a city you've never been to before, or not in a city at all. Its stupid, and its unfair, but that is apparently my tough luck and the tough luck of countless others like me. And I know that after a year in another job, or maybe even less, my resume will look better. And then I will have a power I do not have now, and I can think about transferring or looking for an entirely new job in Chicago. If I even still want to go back. Because a year is a hatefully long time, and some of the people who lure me back to the city on the lake will undoubtedly be gone by then.

But right now I don't care about any of that. I want to go home. Its amazing how strong that desire is. And I'm not going home, and even though I am excited about going to Boston, going there apparently means acknowledging that I might not go home for a long time. That there's a slim chance that despite my stubborn nature and dogged insistence that I am the master of my fate I might not ever get home, at least not home to Chicago. It makes me feel so jaded. It makes my heart ache. I hate it. I still want to go back to Chicago, but I'm twenty-three, and that's old enough to know that you don't always get what you want.