This morning, a friend posted a notice of her anniversary. Five years. I went to the wedding the day before leaving NYC. A nearly last minute opportunity. It was very sweet, a great way to leave on a high note, celebrating both events with friends. Though admittedly the wedding did overshadow my leaving a bit at the time.
Time is airborne. That was half a decade ago. How many half decades are aloft, how many remain.
Later that same night we all sat at one of our favorite meeting place bars. There was a going away party. The newlyweds shut the place down. Not even I, the great and mighty, could stay any longer. It was time to go. I had subleased my apartment a few days before that, which lasted exactly a year. The landlord sent documentation that made it difficult to argue. When you buy a house in California you can not easily claim residency in an NYC apartment, also.
So, I let it go.
Turns out that apartment should have been kept, at almost any cost. Such is life. You jump and hope for the best. Then, you jump again and again and again, until you are crazy from the jumping. At a certain age, I'm not sure which, you just tire of jumping and you want stability in your life. You have tired of hearing people announce the hidden value of change. You have benefited all that you wish to from uninvited change. You just want those people away from you, happily changing themselves elsewhere. Sometimes you just need a couple years of stasis, to keep from going jump crazy.
Though a decrease in mobility hasn't taught me how to better shop for groceries, and my cooking has only become marginally better. Perhaps I am only romanticizing ideas again. I need an alligator attack to bring me to my senses. I miss the randomness of Florida. You could always expect it to be crazy there - crazy hot, crazy humid, crazy swamps, crazy rivers, crazy drivers, crazy people. It is a state of energized fools. Beware the emptying of the bayou. The sun draws something out from deep within the genetic makeup of mankind there. It oozes out through the pores, a syrup of insanity. You can hardly see it when you're there, can't miss it upon returning.
Oh time, remember?
A friend's mother passed away a couple months ago and in trying to be there for her I realized that I can hardly manage even a slight change in schedule. If something is not an outright emergency then there's very little time for it. I no longer get to decide when I can be free. Or, the cost of making that decision too often is too great. So, you learn to love the treadmill, the semblance of motion.
I was likening myself to a happy Sisyphus a few weeks back, riding my bike up the side of a mountain. I had disabled the front suspension so that bike was as rigid as it possibly could be. Something about the slight loss of forward and upward motion through downward force applied was bothering me. I recall telling myself that if I was going to push anything up the side of a mountain I wanted it to be a rock, not an octopus, not a marshmallow, but a rock. A meaningless distinction in an eternity of uncertainty; riding melting marshmallows into the sky.
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