I moved across the country.
I drove a truck with everything I own across the US. Slept in hotels with wicker chairs in the midwest. Then the land became less flat as I went westward. Mountains - for the first time, I drove by mountains! Not some backdrop in a photo from a vacation, not a distant skybox in a game's fantastical vista, but watching the ground beneath my wheels pour out and burst to the sky, massive displacements of stone and soil that are both gradual and violent and now exist in this strange classification of our brains that is known as "beautiful" and categorizing it in any other way seems a pure logic error, how we've evolved for eons with these vistas and our minds have bent to appreciate them as universally pleasing as the smell of baked bread.
The salt flats of Utah were alien and harrowing, and I was not prepared.
I've left everyone I've ever grown to know and love in my home state. I've left behind relationships I've fostered for my entire life, and packed my things and set off to the west coast to be with a man that I love.
It's been a month, and I'm still terrified.
For six years I kept my childhood unsorted in a pile in the basement I lived in. Purging whenever a wave of mania lent me energy to clean, and repeatedly setting aside boxes of abandoning fathers, art from elementary school and ACT scores, resolving that I'll "deal with them when it's time".
I threw those things onto a truck (or rather, my partner did as I carried things out; he flew out to say goodbye to the four children I've lived with since their birth and goodbye to my mom and goodbye to Ohio), and when I arrived here - arrived! the destination, the final point of settling, this place still doesn't feel worthy of those qualifiers, as if I'm a vagrant forever dependent on the kindness of others while I struggle to make a living, the lies that Capital D Depression peddles as unmovable truth despite any personal success you've garnered - when I arrived, it was time to confront them.
Abstract crayon lines drawn in therapy that represented how much I missed my father, gaudy golden trinkets from my racist grandmother, photographs of me with my late, brilliant, black and beautiful grandmother whose mind failed before her body and whom I think I will never be done grieving, my expired notary certificate from when I was an accountant and drank too much, and seashells from my preschool years of summer visits to my father when he lived in the Carolinas with the red-headed baker he left us all for.
Last night, I walked to the beach (the beach! the ocean! I've never lived at the edge of the earth before, and my mind still isn't able to reconcile it fully), and with my partner I threw the seashells I kept in a sticker-covered tub for twenty years into the ocean.
It was symbolic of a lot of things. Letting go of the past was one, recognizing the transience of life another, clean slates and new beginnings and not letting pain be a barrier keeping you from moving forward.
Distributing fifty-two individual goodbyes to students of mine while wearing a charismatic smile when I wanted to cry is exactly as exhausting as I thought it might be and it tires me even now to think of those last days of sadness.
I think there are a lot of things that I'm still grieving.
Once I'm self-sustaining (a common theme in my mental list of priorities, one that I feel I always fall short of and therefore becomes supporting evidence that I don't deserve to be here, wherever that here is at that moment), it'll be better. I love this man. We're starting a life together and it's brilliant so far, but it's continuously peppered with self-doubt that I'm no more than a burden, that I’m baggage with its own adorable complete set of miniature baggage in tow filled with lead, and I'm farther away from my mom than I've ever lived, and the apartment is overrun with my gluttonous array of musical instruments that on good days I can say is what pays my bills, and, and, and, and,
and my smartwatch just told me that it's time to breathe.
Hello from San Francisco,
Wish You Were Here!
But it's good. In re-indexing my life in its current state there's no way that the tally is in the red, no matter how you look at it. It's a transitory period, and soon it will settle - the dust, me, the world around me that’s now lush and green and alien and full of birdsong that I can't identify - and I have to breathe.
Life is good, life is grand. It is difficult to be alive, but it's worth it, I think. Especially now that I'm here.
dededos
theartofmadeline
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blakekathryn
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