Other diaries in this series are: Fade to white | Somewhere warm | Day to day | Haunted | Strings and Stakes | The way out is through
The transition back into your body is seamless for once, lacks the unsettled jolt and brittle crackle of years ago, of nightshift and your body cycling between caffeine and alcohol. You Braille the top sheet, blanket, cat doing yoga on her side of the bed, the smell of visitors now gone, their physical trace reminds you of the time before. Their presence over the weekend was good and confirms what happened was real, how Movedizo was an actual place and not some elaborate coping mechanism to deal with your 20s. Everything you told your boyfriend—a quicksand town escapee himself—was true: those who managed to build enough escape velocity were lucky, and those who did not risked waking up in a bar one evening, the same one they entered at 21 and find themselves now 35, with drive shed from the body like dead skin replaced with forehead lines. Your extrovert boyfriend loves people and parties, is excited for this context, sees now the powerful heart and chiropractic embrace of James who fled Movedizo for Montana with his wife, and now Alan who became a lawyer but inexplicably not a douchebag.
You’d spent the evening with your old friends in a brewery recommended by your unrequited mentor the first week after you moved. You remember that day in your body still, sitting on the porch while warm rain accompanied your Daniel Boorstin, waiting for your sight unseen roommate to arrive. You sat at the top of the stairs with your new roommate, a glass of cheap red in your hand and apologized for maybe crying. You sleep on the floor at first. Your new room is Victorian brick. Outside people have rainbow flags for Pride. Everything is okay. Your new friends wait for belongings that never arrive and take you to bookstores after the swamp like depression settles over you. The calls from home are filled with bad news or asking for money and your notions of home dissolve.
Four years later the commencement photographers in social media feeds are tired of your unrequited mentor and this brings a kind of relief. Sitting in the booth over an IPA while your old friends tell you about their lives, you can almost see him, grad school dorky and uncomfortable in his body. You’ve blocked everything tied to Movedizo over Facebook and with a Chrome extension, so a kind of search result black hole exists around your mentor, the same black hole your twice yearly emails fall into and now you have stopped even those. Compared to the death of your former partner this is a useless grief for a correspondingly dead person. You wish you could tell either of them how much better you are doing, but this feels like a lie as soon as your brain works through petrified layers of doubt and anxiety to consider this. You try to think of negative things about the specter in your head: in spite of his ambition he’s still teaching at Movedizo. That he might sit up at night the same way you do (for different reasons) and fend off the creeping bitterness that might characterize your generation: he’s lucky to have the job he has compared to the rest of his cohort, but knows he can do better. He still doesn't seem to know what the fuck to do with his hair. You remind yourself he is busy and doesn't have time to feel resentment or even indifference toward you, although you must have seemed like a crazy person at the time and it’s possible you are a crazy person, isn't it? The endless prescription, insomnia, and attempts to drive away the people in your life who care suggest this might be true.
You remember everything at once these days. This is a byproduct of therapy, having all the feelings at once. This is walking around with a license plate half embedded in your skull. On the therapist’s couch you feel a dim surprise: What do you mean, 'Land of Enchantment'? I thought everyone had one of these.
This isn’t working. In bed now, the cat stretching against your back, you pace through exercises to try and calm down. This would be easier if Movedizo were more real and did not have the bleached photograph quality of memory, blurred from too many nights in bars and weighted with regret. Your heart wants more room to beat. You are indignant at your feelings, juvenile and stupid. You tell yourself it is a chemical imbalance and not any more real than the hallucinatory spiders that appear when you don’t sleep for two days. You inventory as quickly as possible while you slow your breathing against the attack: you are at home in bed now. Next door your boyfriend who loves you sleeps, the separate rooms an artifact of your nightshift work. Your cat loves you, even if you are just a convenient heater that feeds her. At the new job you draw MSPaint monsters onto a coworker’s vacation photos and he shows them to everyone the way you’re supposed to bring your kid’s best artwork to the office. He’s about the right age to be your father and part of you wonders if that’s why you’re a discarded toy, why your boy-girl Legos never worked right. You are safe. You are smart. People love you. Not everyone has these things. But this is Stuart Smalley bullshit and now you’re crying. God. Does this even fucking help, the sadness for the little girl, the one who still exists in the space where love and acceptance were accessible? You try listening to upbeat music but Pandora betrays you with the “advice” side of Michael Stipe’s repertoire and less obvious Police songs and now fucking Mazzy Star and finally some U2 and this only reminds you of the time you were drunk and realized you could sing I Will Follow over Vertigo and everyone in the bar laughed and now the cat is pacing back and forth in the space between your keyboard and chest.
For a moment that space is real again and you are perfect, born again in the recovery that is mourning what you never had. Your former partner is alive and not ash over Texas. Your family is well again. Your mentors are proud of you. The construction of your life is not atonement for the sum of your mistakes. Your self-worth is no longer a finite resource, absent or abundant depending on geography. Everything is going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.