My dear, dear friends, I write to you from another La Quinta (”La Quinta Otra,” as I’ve been calling it in my sad, stale Spanish) in El Paso, Texas. I feel like it’s appropriate to be ruminating on the idea of what that means: The Step.
Driving through the entire width of Texas looks a lot like I thought it would based entirely on popular culture: like a stunning rendering of the landscape from any given Roadrunner cartoon. Driving west from Dallas was fascinating—barren tracks of farms and oil rigs compressed by an unfathomable blue slowly starting to slope into rolling hills, prairies, and inexplicable mountains.
Between yesterday and today, after driving (well, riding shotgun—Dad still hasn’t given up the steering wheel, and I’m not complaining) about 14 hours through Texas, I feel like I’ve reached something just beyond articulation, something all wrapped up in spending a night in a place called The Step. I’ve gotten where I am one step at a time: there are no shortcuts in life, and just as each and every of the more than 1,500 miles of pavement on this trip traveled beneath the wheels of my Toyota Yaris, you’ve got to live every step.
6 more hours on the road and Dad and I will reach Tempe, where my new life starts. One more step. See you on the other side.
(Check out highlights from these last two days after the jump—click to bigafy!) (more…)
One day of travel down—a little over 12 hours in the Yaris and we’re officially a third of the way to Arizona. Check out some highlights from the trip after the jump. (more…)
How quickly time flies: this time last week, I was revving up for Moving Day; now, I’m easing into my final day home with my family.
There’s a line from a Marilyn Hacker poem called “Nearly a Valediction” that I often come back to (read: accidentally plagiarize from) that perfectly sums up what I need during this gap period between my Old Life and my New Life: “trust / that what comes next comes after what came first.” Sometimes, when all of the touchstones of your life become uprooted, the only order that emerges is order, a peace that comes with chronology.
Well, here’s what came first: a few snapshots from my week at home.
Went to the beach with dad; beers, books, and sunshine were prominent themes.
More after the jump. (more…)
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of me peeling myself off of my parents’ new couch to send you all a postcard from my briefly unemployed and deeply awesome existence.
Moving Day was Monday, and it went as well as these things will go; which is to say, I only cried once, and was able to binge eat my supermarket brand sushi in the parking lot of the Harris Teeter in record time before sleepily driving the four hours home to South Carolina.
After the inevitable coma, I rose to realize that the lightness of my key chain (ceding my office keys and my apartment/mailbox keys has hilariously stripped me of my adulthood, you know?) is strangely symbolic: the only things I have the capacity to open right now is my car and my parents’ house.
Transitions are about getting from one place to another, and I could babble a bit about opportunities and opening doors, but why pontificate when I can tap Rilke for a far more eloquent moment:
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
—Ranier Maria Rilke in Letter Four, Letters to a Young Poet
Cliché though it is for me to be quoting Letters to a Young Poet at this particular moment in my life, what can I say? We are so young, my dear friends: let us live on into these questions. I plan on taking a couple of my own to the beach in the morning; I’ll let you know if I figure out anything important.
I think I have to agree with Pete, who sent this my way this morning: “Woody Harrelson was born for that role.” Trust.
So maybe the reboot isn’t quite as successful as I thought it would be: last day of work is tomorrow and Moving Day is Monday. I imagine this fallow period won’t extend much beyond that, as I delve back in to the soft bosom of South Carolina before driving west with my Dad.
Manifest Destiny! Westward expansion! Purple mountains majesty (wait, that’s probably not Arizona, is it?). Anyway, if you’re reading this, thank you for putting up with me during this transition period; a better blog will emerge on the other side, I promise.
