The morning after I no longer had a job, I went and took these photos.

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.