August 24, 2010. 2:11 AM

This feeling is familiar. This emptiness, if it should be called that, which seems to all together consume everything down to the marrow of my bones. And laying here in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar place, I'm at a loss. I simply have no where to run.

When I was 15-years-old and my father was stationed in Oakland, he opted to live in Novato rather than in Alameda, where the housing and schools were run down. A blessing in disguise as that house and what lay beneath it would be where I found refuge, even long after we had been forced from its walls. 

At this exact moment, I wish I could close my eyes and transport there. Sneak out of the maids quarters tucked behind the kitchen on the first floor and where I called home for three years to walk out into the cold night and start another transformation. Rise from the ashes of my teenage self to describe the despair I carried before falling asleep to dreams filled with wild sage. I was lost, but only for the night. With morning always came some unspoken promise of change, mapped out within the pages of my journal. All that was left to do was translate it to myself. 

I always went to the same place - an old abandoned runway the Coast Guard had taken over when the Airforce left, building a brick wall along its tower to keep the passerby and occasional drug addict out. But I was determined, I refused to stay away. And so its cement floor, infested with owl pelts and overgrown weeds, became my sanctuary. The estuary my alter, Third Eye Blind's self-titled album my bible. 

Even in college, I went back there. Sometimes to sit, to scream, to smoke a joint and just melt away into the far off howl of a coyote. I was alone to be whatever or whomever I wanted, and in that there was peace. 

But who am I now? I feel myself slipping away at moments. I've seemed to have lost my purpose among the gray tiles of this house, misplaced it in one of the thousands of job applications I've sent out into the world.

I've called out of her, my purpose, you see. But she no longer responds to me anymore and I've grown quite tired of waiting. 

I'm counting down the days until I'm back in California. I don't plan on telling anyone that I'm coming home. I doubt I'll stay anyway, just be there long enough to collect what little belongings I have left and say my goodbyes before coming back here. I applied to a TEFL certificate program in Prague. It's 4 weeks, enough time to disappear. And then from there, I don't know. Maybe I'll go to South America, maybe I'll try the bay again. I just need to find answers, I need to start learning how to ask the right questions - I'm afraid I haven't been for the last 23 years. 

All I'm sure of is that I can't continue this way. I choose life. I choose all the matching suitcase, owning your own home, raising kids in the suburbs bullshit. But for now, I have to scare myself. I have to do the things I've only dared speak of when alone, when wishing of what will become of my life. 

I should say I'm counting down the days I can return to that runway for the last time and leave knowing I have the strength to never come back again. I told myself I would lay down among the fog of that city. I told myself this would never consume me again. 

More importantly, I told myself the world would remember Mariel. Here begins that story.