it's dark out

This morning I awoke to the sun streaming in the windows, and NPR was playing, and the dog was licking my face. I'd slept about ten hours, full of sage-rubbed pork and pumpkin ice cream, and it was Monday and the prospect of work seemed exciting.

Then I left the office today and it was pretty much dark, and I remembered why I hate this time of year--specifically, the first couple weeks after daylight savings time, when the dusk falls so quickly it surprises you, and it's only five o'clock but you want to go home, curl up in a chair, eat croutons out of a bag and watch television all night.

I'm honestly in a good place right now, very much liking Wisconsin and feeling comfortable at work, but I can't help but miss Highland so very much on a night like tonight. I got a ton of shit done this past weekend (edited the B's manuscript in full and compiled a list of writing duties and made a weekly calendar of deadlines), so tonight I'm free to finish current reading, but the house is empty because the B is conferencing with students until 7:30. And as I hung up my coat I couldn't help but think that on a Monday night last year I would have entered Highland through a side door fogged with steam from the dryer in the basement, and there would have been many lights ablaze, and three of my favorite people in the world scattered throughout the rooms, and I would have come home, thrown open a cookbook, recruited at least one of them to go grocery shopping with me, and we would have eaten dinner together. And afterward there'd probably be a trip down to McGoff's, because there always was. I would not have finished my current reading, or put away laundry, or gone to bed before three in the morning.

There's a passage in Heat that I dog-eared the second I read it, and though it has little to do with the book, it has everything to do with my life right now, and I have read it no less than ten times since I started the book last week:

For his part, Mario remembers [the first few months in Italy] as the last lonely time in his life, a sustained pleasurable period of melancholy, "a happy sadness." At the end of diner, he'd go up to his room, light a candle, put on headphones, playing mainly Tom Waits during his balladly, self-pitying, hey-buddy-can-I-have-another-drink phase, read (working his way through the novels of Faulkner), looking up to take in the view--the mountains, the Reno River--and longing for company but recognizing he was better off without it.

Tonight I'm going to turn up the iPod, and make lentil-pasta-garlic soup, and maybe dye my hair or sit in the tub for a bit. My life now is orderly, and I don't wake up every morning with beer and ash on my tongue, and for precisely those reasons I finally write regularly, and am reading more than ever before. I have a very small Wisconsin social life, and most nights I am home doing writerly-designy-cooking things, and I could not dedicated this time to those activities if I was still sitting around watching "Top Ten Bridges" with the people I miss every day. I know that this transition-feeling will pass, just like the first six months of quiet nights at home planning lessons in Minnesota felt so different from the rest of my time there. And I am okay.

But I am also glad that I can honestly say that those nights that I arrived at Highland, I stood on the side stoop for a minute and listened to P and Jeano talking to each other in the kitchen, and watched their shadows move behind the Tide-scented steam that clouded the panes, and I looked down into the basement window well and saw the B on the bed with the dog, and heard the faint sounds of SportsCenter.

And I usually paused there for a minute, amazed that a place could feel more like home than my real one ever had, and I willed myself to remember those little moments, because I also knew that one day soon I'd find myself in a as-yet-unknown city, and remembering nights like that would help me become the person I wanted to be, and help me get through the times to follow that would be so very different, and--always--remind me that for all the shit that was Kato, I was also happier there than I ever had been before, and to not ever lose sight of that person.

And they do.