In forty-eight hours, the country will, inevitably, be at war. In forty-eight hours, I transferred my life from a Midwest capitol to an east coast city, and my move bears the weight of inconsequence in the shadow of the looming conflict. There�s guilt, almost, for feeling celebratory and definitely a sense of flippancy about my actions, but I look around me, and I don�t see insane leaders who threat unnecessary violence, but it�s tempting to see only my reality, and my reality, as of yet, is not bloody or torn.
There are paper fish on the oven beside me. Three colored-penciled goldfish cut from the pages of a child�s coloring book. Time and the heat of the oven have caused their edges to curl into themselves, creasing more severely where a careless body part brushed against them. They watch me intently as I type this with the same ferocity that Marilyn Monroe stares seductively at me from her perch above the stove. Perhaps the same roommate who placed her in such an impromptu shrine also arranged the homage of the small jars of pumpkin pie spice, salt and pepper, and garlic powder forgetting that such things are everyday in a kitchen.
Of course, there�s magic to making the everyday extraordinary, or what�s more, making the extraordinary more beautiful in the brilliant light of day.
There�s an easiness to my move here that I didn�t expect. There�s no homesickness or sadness, and the only loneliness I feel is the perpetual emotional loneliness with which I was born, and I welcome that familiar feeling as one of the few indications that I�m the same person who once lived eight hundred miles west. Those friends I left behind�the true friends that last beyond girlhood to womanhood commence with me to this city. They call and write with promises of late spring visits and summer sojourns, and I believe their promises without doubt. These are the friends whom I shall visit as their families gather around them to see them off in their final, everyday hours. Or they will place their ears close to my lips to hear my final words whether those words are poignant or otherwise.
My cat loves our new apartment. He wanders from room to room, amassing favorite spaces to nap or play. He particularly adores the windows that have been thrown open in this first pre-Spring warmth. The sunlight strikes his black fur, creating purple-blue highlights that turn his yellow eyes antique maize. He is king here already�lording over my roommate�s tiny dog with stern eyes and a playful tail. I am glad he�s here with me. There�s salvation in the purring of a cat as you lie in the dark of a new room, watching the subtle changes of a night�s familiar sky.
On the foundation of an easy move rests the discovery of an easy friendship. She is the only familiar person to me in Boston, though her familiarity depends on words written to sprawl across miles, and it�s surprised me how much peace I find in her presence, for the possibility that her actions would feel just as familiar as her words never occurred to me. I have seen her smile a thousand times repeated, though I have not. She is a water lily, painted and submerged, light and dark, dynamic. In the past, we have crammed expectations into moments longer than a weekend but shorter than a week, desiring that our words written be translated without effort to physical interaction. We weren�t exactly foolish, but rather, idealistic.
The timbre has changed. The time restraints have been taken away, flying to the same wasteland where unnecessary doubts retreat to die, and our script, penned by hands other than our own, has fallen away. My feelings grow stronger, more certain. It�s the easiness that I didn�t expect after more than two years of troughs and peaks, rushed smiles to cover misunderstandings, and the battles of outlined, though incomplete, selves.
I expected self-consciousness and awkwardness not this extraordinary, brilliant everyday.