i am halfway home. my tiny car, approaching 100,000 miles, has managed to swallow all of my remaining belongings, as i swing its unbalanced chassis into my aunt’s garage in bensonhurst for the evening, only to regurgitate them tomorrow morning when I arrive at my parents’ place. i’m sure they will continue to appreciate my using their home as a dumping ground for all of my accumulated life-things.
bittersweet, leaving new york city, a place where six months ago, i would have penned of my deep loathing of this place – loneliness, and the temporary breakdown of creative impulses. that’s what caused the most despair. being unable to create. and that is what i set out on this journey to set right.
as a coworker put it, i’m the “boy who cried, ‘last day.’” never really came clean about that with everyone at my office, just sort of threw it on them this week that i was really leaving this time, and probably not coming back. and they threw back at me a whole lotta love in the form of several going away parties, one of which i expect will happen again next week in my absence.
an almost universal response to my plans, or lack thereof:
Anywho: “… you’re doing (x, y, and/or z) for GOOD?”
Me: “I don’t really know what ‘for good’ means. I’m doing it ‘for now.’”
i am alone. zia maria is upstate and joe is finishing his shift driving the MTA commuter bus. he does the same route three times daily, back and forth from sheepshead bay to uptown 5th avenue. he knows the roads and traffic patterns of the city like the back of his hand. but his understanding of the many places he hasn’t visited in all his 50 years here is limited to watching the people in the streets and the neighborhoods change from the driver’s side window as the city rushes, or crawls, by him.
music: U2, October
Sun Kil Moon, Tiny Cities
