I've left Chicago. And it only took 2 months to discern what I had to keep and what I had to begrudgingly throw away, pack up the result of said discernment, say goodbye to everyone in Chicago, sell off my furniture, clean my apartment, and bring it all down 3 flights of stairs.
I understand that 2 months might seem like a long time. But in the 67 days I've been unemployed, a lot of things needed to happen before I could leave.
1. Christmas happened. Presents had to be made and a trip to Florida was taken.
2. January happened. Despite not going out on New Year's Eve, January was a month of drinking. It was fun. I blacked out. I made bad decisions. I made some really rad new friends and got to enjoy Chicago likes nobody's business after not having much of a social life for a year. Then I ran out of money.
3. Sinking in had to happen. After having made these grand decisions to leave Lula, move back to Lebanon, OH for an undetermined amount of time, and head westward, I almost forgot that now I had to make a fuckton of little decisions. Do I really need all this fabric? Will this adorable bright orange retro lamp serve a purpose in the next year? Why do I need to keep my Yiddish magnetic poetry? Does Mod Podge go in the box with all of my paints or in the general craft container? Yeah, these all seem really ridiculous, but when you are faced with a giant mountain of these decisions, it seems impossible to deal with. So I spent the first week of February freaking the fuck out. Then I called my mommy. Then I freaked out some more. Then I packed up all my shit.
4. Coming home for a week and a half happened. Such a good thing. I built a website. From a blank page, up. And I painted a picture. I finished updating my ever-looming, post-Lula resume. I designed a business card. I had to GET EXCITED about having the time and resources to REALLY start over. And I did. So excited.
5. This weekend happened all over the fucking place. Oh, this weekend. My parents are amazing. I love them. They are cool and smart and funny and endlessly generous. But when my family gets together, especially in a stressful situation (like moving all of mine and my sister's belongings down three flights of stairs for two days), we all revert back to the dynamic we had in the tumultuous years of mine and Katie's adolescence. There's screaming. There's yelling. There's crying. There's daddy issues. There's sibling rivalry. There's all kinds of bullshit that is just so not the thing to deal with on moving day. But we did it. Barely, but we did. And I love my parents more than ever.
6. The ride home SO HAPPENED. My dad drove the cargo van home this afternoon. Mom and I finished everything up and headed east on 90/94 at 11pm. It slammed down rain the entire time. 27 miles north of Indianapolis, we decided to pull over for a bit and see if it chilled out a little bit. Oh quite the fucking contrary. We sat in the parking lot of a Flying J trucker plaza in LEBANON, INDIANA for 2 and a half hours. Why? Because an entire storm system of tornadoes was hovering over the lower half of Indiana all night. THAT'S WHY. This is my life. And these are the things that happen to me. And one day (tomorrow), I will laugh about it in this totally objective, anecdotal way, but right now, I'm just reveling in the "Fuck my life" of it all. LEBANON, INDIANA. I really want to make sure the irony of that location is not lost on you people. According to Google Maps, that Flying J Travel Plaza (complete with a "Family Style Restaurant", 3 Slurpee machines, and trucker showers) in Lebanon, Indiana is the EXACT halfway point between Chicago, IL and my parents' house in Lebanon, Ohio. This is just all too symmetric and annoyingly karmic for my taste.
So this is just the song. Because the last 2 months of my life read like an indie coming-of-age movie, fraught with internal and external conflict, family drama, physical and financial strain, revelations, and road trips.
Strange fascination, fascinating me
Changes are taking the pace I'm going through
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