Manifest destiny? If only ...

I keep feeling like I need to be someone else. I don't know who, but I know the current me isn't working. At all.


I keep thinking if I could just go to California and start over, it would get better. I'd be with my cousins and my aunt and uncle. I could see palm trees and the ocean, and I could smell the eucalyptus that immediately takes me back to my childhood, when my heart rate would rise upon landing at Burbank with Mom. The cabin door would open, we'd descend the steps, and I'd know I was someplace special.


Southern California always makes things seem possible to me. It is one of the places where I feel the happiest. I don't know if that comes from my childhood visits or my love of all things Aaron Spelling -- probably it's both -- but when I haven't been there for a few months, I start to feel almost lonely, as if a part of me is missing and needs to be restored.


Now more than ever I feel the need to be there.


I have spent the past six months thinking of ways to re-invent my life, and I've come up empty. A new job is proving not to be an option. Even a new job within my old job isn't fixing what has broken inside me.


The truth is, though, I missed my California dream. Had I left for USC in the fall of 1993, I'd be a different girl now. A better one? A happier one? That, I cannot say.


All I know is that here in the spring of 2010, I have a husband and a mortgage, and a cross-country move just isn't part of my reality.


And so I keep on keeping on, even though I cannot see how this current pace will be sustainable over the long haul. I know I need things to change. I actually think I need everything to change. But when those changes aren't an option, where does that leave a person?


For now at least, it leaves me not goin' to California, with an achin' in my heart.