pink sunglasses

Today was only the third Monday since moving to Madison that I have not had to go to work at the marketing firm. Although the alarm went off this morning (set to “How Lucky We Are,” as it has been for at least a month now), it did not signify anything. It was a formality. It said, Maybe you should get up and go to Panera and read through your Michigan visitor guide and your new textbooks.Or you can stay here. Whatever.

I had a fantastic two days in Minnesota this past week, two days of pink sunglasses and big beers and Kwik Trip corndogs and nearly drowning in an Eden Prairie thunderstorm. There were pumpkin pancakes and a version of the whiskey song that spawned an impromptu dance party and a bucket of chicken eaten on a deck-couch at four in the morning. It was one of the few times I’d felt perfectly happy and normal since I left that small town on the banks of the Minnesota River. When we walked into our old bar, the owner looked up and smiled. “Where have you guys been?” he asked. And at one point, as Liz and I were standing next to that bar, leaning up against the wood like we had so many times before, she looked at me. You know, she said, you look more relaxed than I’ve seen you in months.

Liz is so smart.

It was the perfect two days, the perfect return to a city I’ve avoided for nearly a year. There had been talk of going back in February, and I didn't. I couldn't. But this past week I was ready to go back. And so we did, and I had two wonderful days to see people I still love fiercely, and to recharge.

My time in Wisconsin is drawing to a close, and although I would really like to leave here with a strong sense of what this place means to me, I don't know that I can. On one hand, I feel like Madison made me grow up. It is the place where I worked my first real job, the place where I lived in an apartment that wasn’t falling apart. It is the place where I rose at seven each morning and joined the steady stream of commuter traffic and went to the office to drink coffee and make client calls and sit on board meetings. It is where I buckled down and wrote the best poems of my life to date; it is where I hunted for a press who would publish my book, and for a teaching job that would make me feel as if what I was doing with my life mattered, something marketing never did.

It is where the B and I grew closer than ever. It is where I thrilled at finding a thriving music scene and the best farmers market in the country and new people who I grew close to, who I could call up and who would come over and drink wine on the couch. But it is also where I felt the loneliest I ever have, a town where I cried for what felt like weeks at a time. It is the town where the winter was the worst on record and I felt trapped. Sometimes everything felt wrong, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to make me feel better.

I would have loved to spend another year in this town, to finally get to know it and live in it as someone who was happy to be here. I could have used another year, one where we lived in the sort of place I feel most comfortable—an apartment carved from an old house, featuring leaky pipes and on-street parking and crazy neighbors—down the road from the park we walked the dog in nearly every day. But that’s not in the plans for Madison and me; I am leaving it in just over two weeks and leaving it mostly unfinished. Madison joins Rochester as a town that I liked, just not enough to stay. I suppose that’s what I have to make my peace with: that perhaps nothing during this first post-school year of my life is easy to categorize. It is what it is. It was hard and important and sometimes fun and it did not kill me. There were good times and bad times and a big swath of in-between times. The end.

Moving to Michigan feels right, though. I feel as if I’m returning to something, even though I am going to a place that I’ve never seen before and about to take on a whole bunch of new challenges and courses and campuses. I believe in teaching, especially teaching writing. I believe in doing the best I can to show students that writing isn’t a talent, one shrouded in an indecipherable vocabulary that only a few people have the privilege of being able to do. I believe that my job is to show students that writing is a skill that they can hone and improve upon, that it will change their lives and make them better people and prove useful every single day that they live. This is one of only a few things in my life that I have ever been sure about, and now I get to go prove it to the folks in western Michigan.

The next few weeks should be interesting, then: much packing and planning that needs to get underway, and finally a good-bye to Madison. But I feel ready for this. I am ready for this—particularly when I have pink sunglasses to wear the day I roll into town. Let the next adventure begin.