Sunshine State Of Mind ☼ JJ Maybank

Chapter One: The Girl Behind The Yellow Door

"If I do one thing today

may I be human sunshine

for someone"

- butterflies rising (on pinterest)

Wake up. Pack. Brush hair. Grab my backpack.

I live in New York. Not the cool New York you see in the movies and tv where everyone lives in the city. Where the hustle they have is almost down to a science. Where everyone admits that there, they have the good stuff and you're going to have to work hard if you want some.  Where they've got the billboards and the street fashion and the Wall Street guys. However, I don't live in the city that never sleeps. I live in suburban New York. My parents very early on decided that living in the city was no longer what they wanted when they wanted to start a family. And when they decided, it was a final type of decision. One that would not be backed up upon, or changed even if their daughter were to ask. The plan was that they would commute or work from home. It tended to work that way, as they were co-owners of their own company, that when they decided something it was clear it was what they were going to do. It was like they were saying "Look, we're just like everyone else" and that's true. Mostly because yes, it looks like everywhere else. You've got trees. You've got ugly public schools. You've got neighborhoods of houses. And every single bit of it I am going to miss because I actually do not live in New York. I live in North Carolina in the Outer Banks.

However, I lived in New York. Past tense. Starting today. And that gives me precedent to miss my little New York life.

And damn, I missed all of it. I missed my best friend Dale, who had recently dyed her hair red. Now I doubted I would see it fade until she chose a new color. I missed how depraved everything looked in the winter time. I missed the gray sidewalks. I missed our old boring house, with the yellow cabinets my mom painted. I even missed that stupid sign on my old street that had been vandalized and said to call Sunny for a good time, which was the unfortunate instance of a hooker sharing my nickname.

It's easy for your mind to wander when all you have to think about is your life being uprooted. How small of it was an island? In New York you could go anywhere. Do anything. Even in the suburbs there were shopping centers and huge malls and you could easily drive up to the city whenever you wanted to. This, however, the Outer Banks, did it have that? Was I going to be stuck doing absolutely nothing all summer with no plans and no friends? I've never surfed before and I always forgot to put on sunscreen when we went on vacation. I would be a pariah.

The good news was, I had my own car. The bad news, my parents didn't want me to drive all the way from New York to North Carolina alone in my used 2000 Jeep Wrangler I had saved up enough to buy. The purchase was, in most part, a reason to enjoy independence. Go out and have some freedom with my friends whose faces I had joked to my mom I would soon learn to forget...which she didn't find very funny. Once my parents decided to go ahead and move to the island, I fell into a rain cloud, so I hadn't enjoyed the vehicle as much as I should have. All of which meant that I was taking the ride down with my parents in their shiny Volvo while we listened to Jimmy Buffet, who apparently is very relaxing for my dad, and towed my car behind us.

I was relegated to the backseat and forced to remember the childhood days of becoming bored on long car rides and taking naps until we finally reached our destination and my dad would carry me inside. There was a peacefulness not to be forced into my parents conversation though as my mood around their decision was still harboring anger. At least for some refuge, I had my headphones and put on some familiar Beatles songs through my Spotify, so it wasn't all bad. I wanted to just close my eyes and find myself back in New York. I was supposed to be there. It was where I had grown up. I wasn't good with change. And there hadn't been a lot of it back home. I wanted to melt in between the lyrics of the songs that bounced around my headphones and hide myself there until my parents decided to move us back to New York.