the heart is a lonely muscle

It has been a rocky week here in Georgia. The weather is beautiful, to be sure, and there are just enough oaks and maples, scattered among the pines and changing color, to remind me of fall. The mornings and evenings are chilly. But still, I miss something about fall up north, and the display of pumpkins and mums at the Walmart just isn't cutting it.

On Wednesday, my body shut down. I was at the office, minding my own business, grading papers and awaiting the four hours of afternoon/night class, and then I was struck by a fever. Hot and woozy all over. I decided to listen to what my body was trying to tell me, and I drove home, changed pants, and sat on the couch all night.

The next day, I still felt hot and strange. I answered some e-mails, and I ate some pudding. By the time the evening rolled around, I'd figured it out. I wasn't sick: not with a bug, anyway. But I was stressed out and tired of thinking. I missed my friends, my family, having the option of getting into a car and driving someplace. I was overwhelmed with the vaguest sense of nostalgia, for all the towns I've lived in and things I've said goodbye to, and I needed a day to think, really wade into, those murky feelings and sort them out.

My car, as it turns out, has been nothing but trouble since we moved to Georgia. The passenger side window quit working a week after I had it repaired, and parts of the exhaust system have given up even trying. I'm noticing rust spots I never did before, and it still smells faintly of death on certain days. I realized a few weeks ago that it's time to say goodbye, but now the process of researching new-used cars and makes and models and thinking about financing has created a new vortex of stress, one that I find myself sucked into every spare minute.

(And since when I do I think about cars in this emotional way? Since when is the blue box I drive around anything but a four-wheeled way to get to the grocery store and Target? Why is this suddenly the source of some acute emotional stress? It is a car. Just a car.)

I suppose the answer, though, is that it's not just a car. It is my way out of this town, which in the last few weeks has started to feel stifling. I miss having an actual grocery store and a Target, someplace to buy nice pens and a scarf when the fancy strikes me. I want to be able to throw an overnight bag into the backseat and head up to Atlanta for a weekend. I miss taking long and aimless drives as the sun is setting. As it turns out, I sort of like driving. Especially when it means that it can let me escape for a day or two, slough off some anxiety and give me some perspective.

Let me be clear. I like my students, and the classes I am teaching. I even like my office, despite its lack of a window. Our house does not stink of dog pee. But there is something about the car issue--this idea of needing to replace things--that has tapped into a deeper anxiety, one that involves money and major purchases. It feels like everything is aging, all at the same time: my laptop is going, my phone is getting wonky, the dog is losing his fur. And let me be very clear: I don't mean that having to get a new phone is anywhere near the fact that the dog now takes joint medicine. But all of this reminds me that things get old, that they break down no matter how hard we wish they won't. And so, on Wednesday, twenty-four hours after I'd spent a frantic hour on the phone with my father, making a plan to buy a car, my body said, Okay. Enough of this. And it shut down.

I learned to listen to my body during the year in Wisconsin, when I started developing excruciating migraines. Even now, I still develop aura in times of duress. It's as if my brain has to incapacitate my eyes, pull the plug on my vision for twenty minutes or so, for me to really take the hint.

Our bodies are smarter than our brains, I think. Or at least mine is.

(I realize, too, that I've framed the car issue all wrong. I've been mad because it wants to die now. But shouldn't I be thankful that it got me through the summer, took me up to Vermont and to Boston and Montreal? To Wisconsin and back? That it bumped and growled its way from Michigan to here, filled with lamps and boxes of clothes, and that only now, having deposited me safely in Georgia, does it say Okay, I think that's it for me? It could have pooped out on the side of I-77 in West Virginia in July, on the shoulder of a winding highway in the mountains, but it hung in there until it delivered me here. When I think of it that way, I think, Ah. I get it. We've had a good run, then.)

So this weekend, I drank wine. I went out to dinner three nights in a row. There was French toast one morning. I made phone calls and took long walks on the new greenway trail down the street (this little town, as it turns out, is trying). I read some blog archives, including this post three or four times. I feel a little more centered, though not less lonely. But I remind myself that I am here for now, only for now. The rest of my life still stretches ahead of me. Also, one day soon I will have a new car, and I can throw that overnight bag into the backseat and go to Jacksonville or Atlanta and blast out of this place, and then I will be actually happy to come back here, to this home-for-now.