don't know much

Today, for the sixth day in a row, the sky can't decide if it wants to be gray. It keeps flipping back and forth between overcast and a shade of gray so light it's almost sun, and it is driving me fucking crazy. I know it's not really the sky's fault, but given that the weather seems as erractic as my mind, I would like it to cooperate.

Yesterday I talked, finally, to Colleen. She leave next month for two years in Chengdu. From my Google research, Chengdu is a city in central China. It is also home to the occasional panda attacks. This comforts me, somehow. If I have to send a[nother] friend off to the East for a while, I would like to know that they run the risk of dying a cute death. A very fitting death, actually, for Colleen. Killed by cuteness.

See what I mean? Erractic.

Jeano's out in the hall dragging boxes from her room to the garage. This morning I woke to our downstairs housemate and his girlfriend packing their cars, carrying things up and down the stairs. It's hard to live in a town when everyone around you seems to be singing their own leaving song and you are still waiting tables at the same place, talking about moving to a town you have yet to visit, renting an apartment that you have yet to see.

I know that we will be fine, all of us. I know that I have done this before, packed everything and moved to a city, and I know I will find work. For once in my life, I will actually move with a little bit of money. I know that not everyone is leaving, and that I still have almost two months of late nights at work, pints on patios, hazy day walks in fields with the dog, and people here to remind me of everything good about this town, and friends from before this life, the ones in Brooklyn and Buffalo and Canada who remind me that I existed before the age of twenty-three, too. But it is still weird. Today I figured it was as good a time as any, and said goodbye to people on campus who have done loads of work keeping me sane these last two years working BER. I would be sad, but I feel done with MSU in every way, and I knew I just had to cut myself off. I'm not coming back, and that's okay. But I am a huge fan of clean breaks and ends sewn neatly up. It keeps me sane when everything else feels like a transition. It's far too early to pack, so instead I have to rely on these small things.

There are many things that I'm looking forward to: organic grocery stores, lakes in the middle of the city, Indian restaurants. I know that I'll love the first couple of weeks, installing floating shelves and merging our book collections, hanging mutually approved black and white 8 x 10s, organizing a kitchen exactly the way I want it. It's just strange right now, not yet being able to picture the new place but knowing that my time in this one is limited.

Meh. It should say enough that the album on heavy rotation right now is by a band called The Weepies.

I am so glad to have one last Kato summer, though. I am glad for Leine's with extra fat lemon wedges and brown bottles that sweat as soon as you step outside, and for the relative peace that falls over college towns in June, and the smoky taste of tenderloin grilled, and for the friends left who still walk into this house like it's their own, for friends who are only an hour or so away. For the fact that all of the Highland crew will be within four hours of each other, for mangoes and farmer's markets, for people I work with that I am just now realizing how much I will miss. For the person who owned this house before it was student housing and planted flowers, which still bloom in the thick overgrowth. For peonies that have decided not to open quite yet, and for seeing my family next month on the North Carolina beach as I have every summer since 1985. I can't wait to hang out with my brother again and listen to some hilariously shity song on repeat as we drive a stretch of I-95 at 2 am, Cliff asleep in the back and us up front gossiping, driving way too fast into the dark.





To summer, then.