Obviously the seasons don’t actually come and go with my own head, but it would appear that healing works like this: you get through a lot of shit in the course of a day and a half, and then 10 more years worth of shit in the course of a 45 minute therapy session, you start to feel like your issues will never resurface to mess things up again, and then…….then the real shit comes up, because it’s safe to, and you thought all that other shit was the real shit but wow were you naive and wrong. And if you wake up in the part of San Francisco that’s dubbed even by locals as the Seasonal Affective Disorder Zone, because microclimates in this reason divide the city into essentially different countries, meteorologically speaking, it’s grey and fucking freezing, and it feels like the worst kind of winter.
It seems only fitting, perhaps, that ecstatic nonstop hours of WE’RE GETTING OUT OF HERE would be followed by the full emotional layers of what it means to leave and what exactly I am leaving. The complicated thing about San Francisco and me is that, but for a few literal places like the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park and a handful of restaurants and my gym and our little neighborhood library branch and the Stonestown Galleria, the place is a person. And I don’t mean that in the metaphorical sense like New Orleans being a woman. I mean a real actual person. Who isn’t reading this. And if I happen to be wrong about that they would have to tell me so in order to “catch me out” here, so I’m like, really really really free.
I don’t feel free, though. I feel heavy. I’ve been writing a lot about feeling like I can fly, which I have, more in the past month than ever in my life, but I feel brutally earthbound right now. Maybe it’s because of those damn issues, which are unrelated to any of the above, that turned a lovely evening into a suddenly very, very difficult one. Morning was better, but not by much. The abstractly-referred to person-as-place has a lot of my same exact issues, as though the same writer made both of us up and ran out of ideas for internal conflict. (Or like an AI made us up and ran out of ideas because AI’s can’t have ideas because they can’t GET INSPIRED FROM LIVING so of course we would be underlayered, WGA Strike Solidarity!)
The reasons for the evening going from lovely-to-difficult were entirely my fault. And the reasons for my disproportionate internal heaviness right now has to do with writings no one’s yet read where I let go full rage about being treated in a particular set of shitty ways, which, not 12 hours later, turned out to be ways I treated my own partner, fuck. It would appear then, that this place-as-relationship went as far as it did because we represented to each other what we liked about ourselves, and the reason why it’s dissolution hurt so fucking badly that I’m here blubbering to you all about it half a year later is because when we were at our worst, we were each other at our worst. Nobody tells you about the alternate ending where Narcissus poisons that pond, suddenly shaking with revulsion for the same beautiful rippling creature he was fawning over 10 seconds ago, and he can’t explain why.
I had a dream about you the night before last and I actually saw you walk by that day but you looked more real in my dream. How would you react to a text like that? Maybe context matters. Maybe you have a friend who’s always telling you shit like that.
Tonight I meet the other 6 people in my MFA cohort, over Zoom, which means 6 other people are about to make a friend who’s always saying shit like that. I’m excited to find out what they’re working on, why they chose Georgia, what they’re hoping to do for the next 3 years. 3 years is a long time! Most MFA programs go for two. Ian and I are joined in utter anticipatory ecstasy about the weather. And the cost of living in Milledgeville is so staggeringly reasonable I wasn’t sure I hadn’t traveled back in time when hearing about housing costs.
I want to wrap this up in a coherent Bigger Issues way that makes it something I wrote for a Humanity reason that’s not “no seriously that person-as-place was my ONLY LOCAL FRIEND so if I’m not at the gym and Ian’s at work that means it’s Just Me over here to an extent that I can’t possibly explain” but damn it, I gave myself to the end of this sentence to make up a reason that would be relevant to a wide readership and it cannot be fucking done, not right now, not with these rocks in my stomach, not with a sudden neurological inability to stop listening to this:
Two important factors distinguish my impending departure from that of the narrator of this song: I’m not going alone, and I don’t hate to go. I don’t hate to go, I cannot wait to go, but I hate that I have to go like this. I hate that there is no such thing as resolution when too many issues are at play: I know how that one works because I’ve been down a related road. When I left Seattle, my best friend there and I suddenly had a vicious fight over text, it was entirely out of nowhere and nothing like it had ever happened before. I asked trusted people what the fuck happened, and the prevailing answer was, “I think both of you have more complicated feelings about parting ways than you’ve been aware of.” Apparently we did. Shit’s great between us now, though, and resolved almost immediately after that spontaneous combustion.
Immediate resolution will not happen in the present case. Seattle-friend and I had nothing to resent. In a circumstance where there’s plenty to resent in all directions, wellllll, it’s not even that resolution isn’t possible, it’s that life is too fucking short to come to one. It would take hours, and we’re all gonna die someday, those hours would be a complete waste of time. I’m already 15 years unresolved-trauma-waylaid years late for the life I’ve bent over backwards to obtain. Time is a lie, obviously, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got extra.
Oh! Didn’t I tell you I would share beautiful nature pics from our hike on Sunday? Ian fucking slays behind the camera just like he does in everything else:
I will really miss the Pacific. The Pacific counts as a friend.