Circuitry

Don't worry.

 

I'm not dead.

 

I don't have Zombie virus.

 

I haven't run off to join a Mormon cult. And I wouldn't drink the kool-aid.

 

I've just been moving.

 

To be honest, I've been having the hardest time beginning this post because I feel like I've been away for so long. But when I think about it, it's been less than a week since we spoke last. In that week (reality: 5 days) I found the apartment of my dreams back in my favorite midwestern town, received the keys a mere day later, packed up every last bobby pin I own in one Sunday morning, painted a shitload of closet space and had it all moved in by Monday evening. I also drank a lot of celebratory beer.

 

(AHEM. Before I get in trouble, let me take a moment to thank those that actually painted the closet space, assisted me in packing, and donated their time to at a dime's notice moving all my crap on a Sunday afternoon: thank you Buddy Holly (painter extraordinaire), The Mother (moving dictator and master coordinator), brosef (stop drawing on my furniture and just put it together already) and the entire Kotecki family (no, Emma, you cannot hang your Big Time Rush posters in my room). You're the Rotel to my Velveeta.)

 

Tell me you're still with me.

 

Most of you -- most of my favorite people in existence -- don't even know that I've moved. Here's my announcement:

 

COME OVER RIGHT NOW. And bring me a couch, because there's nothing to sit on right now.

 

I've had a hard time believing I would get back to this point. When my apartment was foreclosed in August due to lackluster landlord performance (read: asshole hadn't paid his mortgage in 4 years), I thought my time as a Real Adult was coming to a soul-shattering end. I thought I was being squeezed back into the hole of my adolescence by some force of God or whatever brand you want to slap on it; stripped of the only space I'd ever let be truly "mine" and "solitary" and "quiet;" regressing back into some state of what-the-fuck-edness that only losing everything you've accumulated as your own can bring. You've been reading. You know that it messed with my head.

 

But I remember how I found the previous place. I had envisioned myself as never having the capacity to leave home, lest some Career Breakthrough stumbled my way or I sold my soul to the corporate takeover (I still don't think they'd take a college-dropout CEO-wannabe). But then when The Mother told me "get out of my house. You're miserable and you know it. It's annoying," and I actually listened, it took me a total of 7 days to make the decision and move out. I did my budget on a Tuesday and had gotten the keys on a Friday. That's how fast it goes, sometimes.

 

I'm a firm believer that when you admit to yourself what you want (and sometimes even when you don't), it will come to you. When I moved into my first place, it was very small but entirely mine. The moment I let myself believe I could have it, I did. And it was the first home I built all on my own (not literally. How awesome do you think I am?). But when I was forcibly moved, I still had not admitted to myself how unhappy I had become with it. It was too small. I'd outgrown it. My energy and my life were becoming stifled because I had moved on without admitting it to myself. And though I was devastated when I left, a tiny part of me was relieved.

 

A few things wouldn't have happened if I had not left that place:

 

1) I doubt I would have started writing. My creativity was so stifled by the discomfort I felt with my surroundings that I couldn't get myself to look outside of any kind of box. And though I didn't know why or how, I could feel it.

2) I would not have gotten that money I used to pay off my car and buy too many clothes in the interim, which made it possible for me to;

3) Find the apartment I had long known was waiting for me but took some stumbling to walk across.

 

So it goes.

 

From all of this I find myself back at one of my favorite conclusions; the one that I keep as true as anything but as hard to hold as a snake swimming in jello. The one that says that everything happens for a reason, simply because it happens. You have no choice but to go with it and hope for the light around the corner.

 

Our lives are not linear. They do not follow a cookie cutter or a play-doh mold. They are circular. And sometimes it takes working your way all the way around that circle to find where you begin again.

 

First meal in the new digs, circa last night. Jealous of my table setting?

 

 

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