Summer of Gorge

Another twelve to fifteen months, another new apartment. Tempting as it is to make another lengthy list of my many inexplicable possessions (Twenty pairs of shoes! Three kinds of electric mixer! How?) or my many, many moves past (15) or even the new mixes I made for my car trips (They're really good, though.), I thought maybe I should celebrate Move 15 with some actual content.

Actual content. I have a new couch, my phone only works on speaker, I don't sleep much, I still enjoy showering, I thought about violently beating four out of six members of our management team with a spiky club yesterday and I'm designing my own tarot deck. I'm worried about our Title X funding, I'm embarrassed to say that I quite like Scarlett Johansson's new Tom Waits album, I've started training to become a rape crisis counselor, and I need to buy some new picture frames.

I've come up with all these conversations I could have with people; what I think about the Narnia books, the stories about the objects in my room, my new plan to rip off High Fidelity and organize my books autobiographically, but when I open my mouth the only thing I can think of is "I always said that if Mark ever left me, I'd start driving south that day. And here I still am." and pushing that away seems to take the air out of anything else I was interested in saying.

I suppose this is a grown-up life. I have my job here, I have family close by, I have friends. I've lived here for almost three years. And I don't really want to go back to New Orleans.

But my life for the last three years has been a binary system. If not this, then of course only that. Not here, New Orleans. Only black, or only white. And suddenly everything fades to gray.

Most of this is just middle of the night thinking. I'm sleeping alone, I can't use my phone, and I feel like a freshman in college. Everyone keeps talking to me about big plans for the summer, how this summer is going to be one of the big summers, that this will happen, or might happen, or how I could do any of these things. Right, I keep saying, I could, and I think about my car keys.