i promised posts about cleveland and i’m finding it more difficult than i thought to write down these memories. i have a few false starts tucked into the “drafts” folder. the truth is — it hurts. it hurts to think of leaving, and remembering everything and its magnificent horror or delight is making me sad. but, i think, that means that i must write it down. i must.
it took us three days to drive into cleveland. it was a big move.
i sat in a pile of boxes in my hot hot hot apartment while joe was off orientating. i couldn’t unpack. i couldn’t cry. i couldn’t dig underneath the numbness to find what i was really feeling.
and that’s how it went until i met my neighbor. finding a friend in the apartment below me was like the night i saw a firefly for the first time: a bright prick of light in the dark.
i wish i could say that it isn’t rare for me to meet a kindred spirit… but it is.
i think red brick roads will always remind me of my first few months in the big city: finishing graduate school, writing a thesis, wishing i could have a baby, watching the women around me birth and birth again while i shuffled along the sidelines not quite fitting in. it could have buried me, all the loneliness and confusion and stress. but it didn’t. because i had a friend.
um, what is that picture? did m. iammarino do some remodeling of the old two-story?
was it the fact that i love your homemade scones {speaking of- isn’t it scone day tomorrow?} and your library that made us friends? now that i think about it- it must have been your light box and your green soup bowl. i miss them. i miss long days talking about nothing and everything, which now that i think about it are really the same things; i miss knowing that i could start making a cake even if i didn’t have an egg because you had eggs,unrefrigerated eggs but eggs still the same. eggs or no eggs a friend is a friend.
you and i both know that m. doesn’t do remodeling. it’s a defunct car dealership somewhere along the interstate in iowa.
eggs belong in the refrigerator… ?
I remember the first time you saw fireflies. It was at my house in DC. I hadn’t realized that there weren’t fireflies out west. Now every time I see a firefly, I am reminded not to take the small beauties of life for granted.