Ramblings of a Gypsy

This town. It sucks a certain life from you. It keeps you in the same monotone motions of everyday living, where while nothing is wrong, everything seems unaligned, the soul displaced and then restlessness takes over. It’s overwhelming and you only want to be anywhere but here. By day, the Bible belt town is ridden with religious families who stick up their noses at anything out of the norm. Picture perfect families, who have grown up here, raised their kids and will set them free just for them to do the same thing. By night, prostitutes and drug dealers, gangsters and college and university students take to the downtown streets for wild nights and raging drinking fests, taking any drug they can get their hands on in between bar hopping.

Chasing the highway wind is the only thing that’s really been on my mind lately. It has been for the last year since my front door closed on an old love that had withered to nothing, much like the roses die and brown and become floral scented dust. Like how ribbon frays and falls to the floor, not even cared about anymore. There’s a tragic beauty when it dies. Bittersweet and hostile and freeing all at the same time…and yet, love was something he knew nothing of.

And although there has been healing in moving on and being freed from a relationship so toxic to my soul, that soul still feels poisoned by this town. Every rumour, every backstabber and every friend who becomes another two-faced mask, unrecognizable from who they once were….it gets old so fast. Suddenly every intersection lit alive by traffic lights, every 24-hour Tim Horton’s where nights were wasted on coffee, every time absolutely nothing changes, just feels like one more battle lost in the middle of the vacancy in my mind. There is a certain freedom to the open road that just can’t be captured in words and it is that something certain I have been craving since spring blossomed. It’s like watching the gypsies poke their heads out from the hotel windows where they’ve been hiding all dreadful winter. They know it’s time to move on, find somewhere new and warmer and more exciting.

Certain things just died for me here. Faith in humanity, the belief that there is an end to the gypsy’s highway, and the yearning to settle, because once again, the wildflowers are coming out of hibernation and the butterflies are free to fly away somewhere unknown and beautiful.

A pink sunset doused the prairie in a disillusioned beauty tonight, framed by wisps of whimsical purple clouds just hovering over the flat horizon. I keep staring down that horizon while counting up the years I am wasting here. I keep watching that open highway, waiting for the perfect moment to just go.

But if the past has taught me anything, there is no such thing as the perfect moment. There is either a plan for the future or there is right now. The choice is there. The time has come.

“I hear the birds on a summer breeze I drive fast I am alone in my mind Been trying hard not to get into trouble but I’ve got a war on my mind So I just ride I’m tired of feeling like I’m fucking crazy I’m tired of driving til I see stars in my eyes…” ~ Lana Del Ray

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