A Privilege, Not A Loss.

I sat in the kitchen at 260 Pacific Street. The open windows reminded me of last summer: that same sense of possibility, that same safeness.

I watched my favourite movie while leaning over the kitchen counter. Sometimes I just don't want to be comfortable.

Life in that city is all muscle memory now. No growth or goodness. Still, it felt good to be her again. Tall, moody, sure of it.

I've been living too many different lives too quickly. The speed is disorienting, and I find myself counting down through the past months: how many airports, how many apartments, how many friends?

But the speed is better than one life lived repeatedly. That's what keeps New Yorkers young. Nothing changes. Every season of life is exactly like the other.

But I want to be my age! It was wrong to act like a thirty year old at eighteen. I should have known better. Instead, I skipped over twelve years of my life as if it were a privilege and not a loss.

On the way back to Detroit, I had to walk myself through it.

"You are in Newark, New Jersey. You are drunk and alone at an airport bar, but you are not sad, so don't tell yourself that you are. You live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You are twenty-one years old. You are not sad. Don't tell yourself that you are." 

Michigan.

(Miranda July)

It felt like an intervention.

Curled tightly into the couch in a matching flannel pyjama set; wet hair, dry skin.

I clutched a crystal glass of grappa in one hand and kept the index finger of the other inside page 372. It stayed there the whole hour, saving my place, so that at the end of it all, I could return to where I was and pick up as if nothing had happened.

I've been staying quiet about it, but they know to ask. Teary-eyed, I say something like, "I'm just gonna tough it out through the summer."

(I think everything will get better when the weather gets warmer).

I'm tired of telling old stories to new people. The experiences like some sort of bartering chip: I'll trade you this anecdote for an hour of your time. I just need a friend.

I've been leaving my fingers in, thinking I'll go back.

But where will I go back to? And will the words still read the same?

New Distance.

On the second day, I got so deep into the internet I felt dizzy when I emerged. Fasting makes you hungry. My head spun.

The coffee shop played songs I'd listened to days before, driving at dusk from Athens to Atlanta. No matter how far I get, everything is the same, down to the very chords.

I looked at everyone dully. The hope to change or to be changed numbed.

It felt too lonely last night: curled in front of the wood red stove, wanting desperately to lean my head against a friendly shoulder, or to read a stanza aloud.

When we broke up, we were sitting side-by-side on a swing set.

He swung high, rattling every foundation. I turned and turned, the metal twisting into itself with a grate and squeak as my toes dug into the wet brown dirt. When I lifted my ankles, the seat spun three times. The motion repeated was violent and dizzying.

There's nothing quite like processing pain in the midst of play.

Not Dark Yet.

In the South, snow is something to celebrate.

The liquor store was packed with the kind of men who walked with their legs far apart, and looked at us too long as we laughed in the parking lot, our eyelashes and teeth cold and wet. 

Erin drove too fast, and we skidded slowly down a back road. I thought briefly of the forested trees outside the window, (wondered how it would feel to wrap metal and bone around their branches), but we adjusted and kept moving forward. 

Pounded tough limes into giant green and orange plastic cups, disguised the taste of cheap gin and drank like we were kids at a driveway hose. 

In bed, I put on the one Bob Dylan song that doesn’t make me feel like I’m listening to a Bob Dylan song. 

The conversation felt right. Everything has gotten simpler, and when we talk about it the pain is like a bruise and not a wound. 

She smiles about her new relationship, cracks jokes about shaving too much these days, destroying her bedroom floor trying to figure out which shoes to wear. I get serious about my endings. “I’m thankful he’s been in my life these past four years, but I’m just finally realising I deserve more. I don’t just objectively know I deserve more, I actually want it.” 

It always surprising to me how simply endings come -- how quickly your heart can be vacated by every ghost. 

Knowing I could be gone for a year, I looked at everything with more joy and more sorrow. 

Deepan angled into the corner of the bar, serious-eyed but smiling. 

My sister sleeping by her window in the morning, pink and snowy. 

My own reflection, pale and reluctantly hopeful. 

I’ll be laughing for years at the memory of Erin running down the hallway naked, a fistful of weed clutched in her palm. 

When I lean back against the grey walls, the lyrics ring in my head:  I know it looks like I’m movin’ / but I’m standin’ still. 

Again.

.

I decided to go to Canada.

They sent me an email yesterday, telling me the best way to reach them from the Vancouver airport is to take a bus to a bus to a ferry to a bus.... and then to hitch hike the rest of the way.

So there's that.

Truthfully, it felt good to be asked, "How long will you be gone?" and to respond, "Indefinitely."

(our window in Zaventem, Belgium)

I've been back in Georgia for a little over a week, and already, the little life I lived in Belgium seems like something that happened to another person. I used to be very good at feeling things. When life happened to me, whether by choice or by circumstance, I knew how to work through the ramifications. Meredith and I used to die laughing at our reworked version of "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better." We changed the words to "Anything You Can Feel, I Can Feel Better." I've lost track of that ability.

One thing I've learned about myself and about writers in general is that we're constantly trying to frame our reality. I need my daily life to have a story arc. Perhaps my sense of displacement isn't merely culture shock, or some reaction to the stop and start speed of my life, but rather from my inability to tie the pieces together in a coherent way.

Technically, I'm supposed to be on a flight to Vancouver in two weeks. But I'm stuck again. Trapped and not sure what, if anything, is more important in the big picture. I can stay in Atlanta and battle my way through the bleakness of it. All money and laying low and wading through relationships I should have made my mind up about years ago. Or I can run away for two weeks or a month to new people and a new place. Snow and books and bread. The choice seems clear if I look at it with my "personal fulfilment" lenses, but more complex when I attempt to be responsible.

Amy called this morning. I haven't saved her number in my phone even after 5 weeks of living together in Zaventem. But when the area code read Florida, I knew it was her. She told me she was calling to say maybe I should become a Catholic. That was her reason for calling! I laughed at the absurdity of it, but sobered up when she explained. "From what I know, they see things in black and white. It seems like that's what you're after. It seems like that's what you need."