Dance with me in Tallahassee tonight, 1950’s.
(Richard Parks Collection)
The best thing about a post-grad education is the breaks, for sure. I hope to shape my life at some point in the future where I can balance month-long breaks and productivity, but I don’t see that happening soon. I foresee 5 vacation days a year. Anyway, aside from a biostats final one week into my winter holiday, I had one week in New Orleans, one week in Tallahassee, 5 days in the Carolinas, and one more week in Tallahassee where I spent a night at the beach. Having a break also allows me to continue living in a deluded fantasy where I live life in various “chapters”. As my friend Kate told me last week in a comedic and earnest phone call last where she was consoling me, I tend to make my life “beautifully tragic”. That, of course, in an insult because it implies delusions of grandeur and also hints that I am melodramatic. But, fuck it, it gives life more meaning.
So, within this chapter, it started horribly. And through disgusting bouts of trauma and depression I feel people can shed skins and become different and new people. I really believe that, and I think it’s beautiful that every 7 years the atoms within our bodies are essentially replaced and we are physically completely different people. But in more basic terms, this break taught me that just seeing true friends and family, be it for 2 hours (ohai Erika) or weeks (ohai family) is the fuel needed to keep going, especially when the last thing you want to do is wake up and go through the responsibilities of living. I’m headed back to New Orleans for the last semester of Grad School and will surely write more delusional chapters in my head. I suggest you do the same.
Thanks to everyone also for allowing me to write whilst sad. It’s a risky thing to do for sure, but for the random friends who still read my blog and who reached out with texts and gchats and phone calls, it really meant a lot.
K off for a drive. Heart yall!
Not sure if this is kitsch or whatever, but I just purchased this. I’ve never cross-stitched before and I’m always in favor of supporting someone’s etsy enterprise. So, well, there you go,
I flew up to South/North Carolina to spend New Years with good friends I met in Alaska. First night was a night spent at a bar in Columbia across the street from the State Capital where a Confederate flag flew high. The following 2 nights were in Asheville where us as a group of drunk friends decided at 10:30pm to nix the bar idea because who wants to go to a place where drinks are hard to get and expensive and where dreams of a classic night are held at an unreachable hight. The next day my friend drove me 1 hour south of Asheville where I met my great-uncle’s widow, Sue Weatherly. There I picked up a book by a long lost Weatherly written and published somewhere in England, and she pointed to me a table built in black walnut by my great-great-grandfather that, she says, will someday belong to me. After this we drove up north to a mountain and a cabin rented by my friend that had a hot tub. It snowed all night, we drank a box of wine in bubbling water while snow fell on our faces. The next night I made an arugula, gruyere, and bacon bread pudding for dinner. After much vodka I went to the empty room downstairs and fell asleep and woke up to a sunrise in the Blue Ridge mountains. I didn’t bring a camera, and would take awful cell phone shots not for showing-off purposes but to remind me in the future of this trip. And, of course, I found a way to put 2 of these on the blog.
Last Friday morning the last I wanted to do was to be surrounded by happy people, alcohol, and beauty. It’s interesting how things like that can seem so unappealing. It’s also interesting when you realize how silly you were to think that.
For now I’m stuck in the Charlotte airport for hours, with free wifi and a netflix dvd of that Bored to Death show that was just cancelled. It’s cute, I suppose?
This is what I look like when I am about to die in a park in New Orleans from a hangover.
wait you are in new orleans?
long distant drunk
Before I moved to Alaska I spent close to a month in Tallahassee. It was there, while out to dinner with friends and later at a bar called Poor Paul’s I met a girl, fell in love as a 26-year-old does, and had a super-duper intense and brief relationship. It was enough to make me not want to move to Alaska, and while in the Last Frontier I missed her terribly. Inevitably our relationship and friendship deteriorated. When I visited Alaska this last August I was in a used bookstore, the Title Wave, and was reminded about how I used to text her from there and ask her advice on what to read next. I texted her, and eventually we began talking again. She was fresh out of rehab, which was great and necessary, and was living in a halfway house in Pensacola. I told her I could visit when I would drive back to Tallahassee. We reconnected and realized how important it was to be a part of each others lives. I visited her every time I drove through town, which has been often these past 2 months. Last Wednesday we were to meet in her new town, Mobile, at noon. I was an hour and a half late which was unfortunate because she had to meet her parents at a specific time so they could drive north to see family for the holiday. We made it work and we went to a coffee shop called Carpe Diem where we exchanged gifts. She gave me homemade cake, and I gave her a book and mix cd.
I came home to Tallahassee, had wine, and fell asleep. I got a call the next morning at 8 from her father, who told me that she passed away one hour after we left the parking lot. She sat down to eat with her family, was in a great mood, and collapsed. Her heart stopped beating. As death cliches go, I have three. 1. It’s not fair. 2. I miss her. 3. I can’t believe she is gone. Her face and mannerisms were still so fresh in my mind, and I fear how this will fade with time
I’ve had experience with this, this death thing, and it is difficult and impossible to figure out how to mourn and honor the dead. I stare at her picture. I stare into space. I wonder if she listened to the cd. I don’t believe in heaven. I believe that we return to the earth. I read a quote once that spoke of the power of the dead, how we secretly feel they are watching us. But they are in the ground, crumbling. And perhaps we are what the dead dream… Or something. How do you move on? I feel like I can’t, but I will, but I feel like a part of me has passed with her. Everything I see I am reminded of her. You know… this is what happens when someone dies… or something.
I showed her a piece of art I’ve been meaning to finish since I started it in Alaska. I am resolved to finish it now, and I am doing a good job at doing it so far, and the art will always be for her. I ate the cake she gave me. How could I not. But I’m throwing away the Tupperware.
The humor and fucked up coincidence is we last saw each at a place called Carpe Diem. As any traumatic or large event tends to do, I am reevaluating things. But for now I just wish there was a more poetic way of saying and feeling the words ‘I miss you’.
