A brief recap is in order. I think I said it best when I was
on the phone with a friend. In February, I got evicted. In March, I was fired.
Now it’s April and I am making cookies. Sometimes life takes you to different
places than you expected to see much less live and make a home in.
On the way to work a couple of weeks before I was let go, I
wrote (in very illegible handwriting since I was indeed driving while writing):
"The fog has turned the bare tree on the hill into a black
and white photograph that I am living next to. All I want to do is drive into
it. Their wild arms are stretched out and back-lit by a sun that has not yet
overtaken the morning to chase away the fog. There are roads that I have only
just noticed and suddenly a yearning turns inside me as if those roads are the
home that I am always looking for. I curse my job in that moment and resent all
of the things that I perceive keep me from driving down those picturesque roads
awash in an ephemeral beauty that I will probably never see again. My own
unpreparedness is more to blame than anything. I left my camera at home. Still,
I am caused to question once again if it was worth it…the years in college
trying to learn a new way of thinking, trying to unlearn my abstract patterns
and artist ambitions in exchange for airplanes and helicopters (but not yet the
sky). It has not been the adventure I imagined. At seven in the morning, that road looks like the adventure I promised myself that I would be ready for when it
found me."
Needless to say, I am ready for a change. I am developing a
very fluid identity. People try to tell me that getting fired does not change
who I am…but I disagree. It changes the role I play in life. That may not be my
very core, but it changes the way I express that core and I just cannot bring
myself to draw a line and divide with finality my identity and the expression
of it. It seems a matter of syntax. Changing my role in life changes my experience of who I am. And so, I am
different. But if you asked exactly in
what ways, I would only have a lot of half thought out philosophies on how
being truly hated by people changes you much like being truly loved by people
does…except it’s different.
Now, I live alone. I live with my art. I am trying to teach
myself how to make time for that again, trying to build a home, trying to learn
new skills like baking cookies. I have never baked cookies alone before. But I
have never done a lot of things before.
