My first week back in the city has been a hard one. I seem to have begun to rise from a slump of a few days... probably a natural transition time that I should have learned to expect by now, with a few extra pangs because of the emotional stress I've been under.
Came home on the 4th of July with much trouble. My car was in an accident and got totaled in extreme traffic somewhere around Barnum, which meant riding back to Duluth with the tow guy, sitting around a few more hours and taking a shuttle back to the airport. Luckily my childhood friend and roommate Lecey is letting me use her car for the time being (not luckily she is working for the MN DNR and is out of a job because of the state shut down, of which I wont say anything else because I could probably fill up an entire bunch of pages with my ranting about that) so I can get around the city and to work right now.
The apartment I'm living in is great. I'm basically subletting from a friend from Clover Valley who is getting married at the end of the month and has been living at home to save money before the wedding. Its in St Paul on a main street near St Thomas, which is a great neighborhood. Some of my very good friends live close to here and its refreshing to be only a phone call away from my closest people. When I moved in though, Grace had moved all of her stuff out and Lecey didn't have much in. The apartment was pretty space for about a week, with my TV on the floor in one corner of the living room, a chair in the opposite corner and a lamp somewhere in the middle. The dining room had a bike in it. My bedroom had a futon on the floor.
Everything can be amplified in an empty, echo-ey apartment, loneliness especially. I watched a lot of daytime court TV this first week.
My birthday, though no ones fault at all, was rather lonely as well. I spent the morning alone at home, met up with a coworker from the Daily around two oclock to watch a documentary about the rise and possible fall of the New York Times (made us both feel really good about our career choices with the paper), then she went home and I spent a few more hours wandering uptown. Most people were out of town, at work or just busy with their own lives this July 7th. And I can't blame anyone for that, its just so amplified because of this belief that our birthdays are supposed to be full of so much fun and excitement and attention on us. I did end up having a great night when I met a few friends for drinks in uptown. It's just the hours that stretch in between things that I have to get used to.
Once again, and it will come up again and again in the next few months, my job is to recreate patterns within time and space and create a life. Just like in Venezuela, where I had to slow down and stop begin used to working 50 hours a week plus go to school, I have to get used to that in Minneapolis/St Paul again. In LA I'll have to do it too. And again and again.
I have been back to work at the Depot as well. At first this was very very hard. I have attached a lot of anxiety to this place and being back at work... having nightmares about going back while in Venezuela, and experiencing sleepless nights each night before I have to go. The main trigger of my stress - the boy who broke my heart - is gone and I only saw him once without any passing story to tell from it. He respected my request to not speak to me at work, which I appreciate. He's in LA now, and I'm positive I will not see him there. It's too big of a city and we're leading extremely different lives.
Mostly, I've been doing as much healing work as possible to make myself ready to leave for California at the end of August. That means a lot of conversations with good friends, a lot of reading, yoga classes and jogging in the mornings, swimming in Lake Calhoun and usually feeling the sadness and loneliness as it comes. As I said, I feel like I'm coming out of a dark few days, yesterday I woke up feeling brighter than I have in a long time. This morning I did yoga and it was better than last week. One step, one day at a time.
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