It'll all be okay. I think. No, I know. Right?
I am moving. I am going back to school to get an MFA at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. There is a TAship attached, though I don't have to teach for the first year. Classes start 8/17.
I have been dating someone from out there and that's part of it (the where of it, anyway), but there are a lot of things going on here. It's a chance to write a bunch -- to have to write a bunch. It's a guided way to examine my relationship with writing. It's an absorbing (if expensive) way to kill time until the job market eases up; and possibly I'll be able to find a day-job doing what I really want to do, which includes teaching in a low-residency MFA program somewhere. It's a way to move into the future again, after a few delicious years of reveling in the present.
But it's also so, so painful. I love it here. An English pub just opened down the street; if I were staying, it would become my neighborhood place, and the place that my climbing partner, Peter, and I would hit every Tuesday night after bouldering. Peter, I'm leaving Peter, whom I have seen more than anyone in the last four years, who has saved my life -- I remember the feel of my shoes in his hands when he brought me down safely after I fell outside last spring; I remember him making jokes on my way to the ER after the ligament ripped free in April. How can I leave Peter -- and Mika and Erika and Shelly and Mark and E. and Emma and Don and Vicky and the Usual Suspects and all the people that I know and would like to know better? Stone Gardens, where I've saved my own life for four and a half years now; the Chittenden Locks, where I eat fresh anchovies on crackers and the gulls eye me speculatively; Golden Gardens, where I walk barefoot in cold sand and collect rocks?
Who thought this was a good idea, leaving all this? Oh yeah, me. And it is. It's time for an adventure, time to challenge my courage.
In five days, everything is packed and I leave for Lawrence, Kansas, to teach the novel workshop. It'll be hot and a lot of fun. I will eat too much, laugh a lot, sleep too little. At the end of July I will head to Rice Lake for a week to spend time with my parents: my mom had knee surgery the day before my ankle surgery and is doing well; Dad's memory continues to slip, and each time I visit I worry that this one will be the last one that he's still himself. In August, I'll drive (via Maine, not exactly the most direct route, I know) to Raleigh. I'll move into my own nice two-bedroom apartment in a converted Victorian house a mile and a half from campus. I will unpack and meet my classmates and buy some textbooks and start some classes, find a grocery store and a coffee shop and a laundromat. I'll think about what I want from this relationship with JK. I'll climb at a new gym with some charming people I've already met and can't wait to know better. I will be scared and thrilled and brilliant and unsettled and broke. I will live an interesting couple of years. Seattle will still be here for me when and if it's time to come home.
In the meantime, it's the meantime.
I have been dating someone from out there and that's part of it (the where of it, anyway), but there are a lot of things going on here. It's a chance to write a bunch -- to have to write a bunch. It's a guided way to examine my relationship with writing. It's an absorbing (if expensive) way to kill time until the job market eases up; and possibly I'll be able to find a day-job doing what I really want to do, which includes teaching in a low-residency MFA program somewhere. It's a way to move into the future again, after a few delicious years of reveling in the present.
But it's also so, so painful. I love it here. An English pub just opened down the street; if I were staying, it would become my neighborhood place, and the place that my climbing partner, Peter, and I would hit every Tuesday night after bouldering. Peter, I'm leaving Peter, whom I have seen more than anyone in the last four years, who has saved my life -- I remember the feel of my shoes in his hands when he brought me down safely after I fell outside last spring; I remember him making jokes on my way to the ER after the ligament ripped free in April. How can I leave Peter -- and Mika and Erika and Shelly and Mark and E. and Emma and Don and Vicky and the Usual Suspects and all the people that I know and would like to know better? Stone Gardens, where I've saved my own life for four and a half years now; the Chittenden Locks, where I eat fresh anchovies on crackers and the gulls eye me speculatively; Golden Gardens, where I walk barefoot in cold sand and collect rocks?
Who thought this was a good idea, leaving all this? Oh yeah, me. And it is. It's time for an adventure, time to challenge my courage.
In five days, everything is packed and I leave for Lawrence, Kansas, to teach the novel workshop. It'll be hot and a lot of fun. I will eat too much, laugh a lot, sleep too little. At the end of July I will head to Rice Lake for a week to spend time with my parents: my mom had knee surgery the day before my ankle surgery and is doing well; Dad's memory continues to slip, and each time I visit I worry that this one will be the last one that he's still himself. In August, I'll drive (via Maine, not exactly the most direct route, I know) to Raleigh. I'll move into my own nice two-bedroom apartment in a converted Victorian house a mile and a half from campus. I will unpack and meet my classmates and buy some textbooks and start some classes, find a grocery store and a coffee shop and a laundromat. I'll think about what I want from this relationship with JK. I'll climb at a new gym with some charming people I've already met and can't wait to know better. I will be scared and thrilled and brilliant and unsettled and broke. I will live an interesting couple of years. Seattle will still be here for me when and if it's time to come home.
In the meantime, it's the meantime.