Knowing What You're Missing

Sometimes you have to move heaven and earth to see for yourself what you've been missing.

I only had to travel to a family reunion in West Virginia to see what I'd been missing, family-wise, all these years.

Precious little.

Don't get me wrong, family is great, but I guess I just hoped they would be a bit more friendly, a bit more eager to get to know us, their distant cousins. The last time Emblem and I saw them, we were small children, and they were recently married or graduated from college.

We don't have any close relatives on my dad's side, so we were included in this reunion in a kind of pity-based invitation. After two days of West Virginia mountains, attempting to converse with complete strangers who share barely-related DNA, and Family Olympics, we took the 8-hour drive back to NY.

The most in-depth conversation I had the whole time involved me getting advice that could be taken at best as highly insulting or at worst as prejudiced. From someone I did not know, and who knew me not at all.

I was exceedingly underwhelmed by the whole ordeal. However, now I knew.

I had nothing to worry about. There was no great family love, no exciting stories, no sharing of instant connections. No comraderie under the family crest. All of these years, seeing only my mother's family, not knowing my cousins from Adam, didn't matter.

I missed nothing. Nothing that I didn't have with my sister, my little cousins, my friends, my life. Disappointing, but relieving at the same time. I don't have to love these people. I don't have to like them. I don't have to worry about them, any more than I worry about the welfare of the rest of the world.

I wouldn't say the trip was a complete catastrophe, nor was it a total letdown. The 7.00 parking fee we paid on our detour to Hershey Park was worth it to get a tour/ride of chocolate-making, to laugh ourselves silly at our confused antics, and to get stuck in the parking lot, driving in cirlces until we figure out there was an automatic sensor on the Exit gate. Even if we didn't get bears that smelled like chocolate to replace the ones we got as children.

Temporary Soundtrack: Float On by Modest Mouse.
Quote Trapped in My Head: "There were so many fewer questions // when stars were still just the holes to heaven..."
Holes to Heaven by Jack Johnson.