Going Home

You You You You - The 6ths

I am sitting at the bar in the kitchen of some lovely peoples' apartment in New Haven. New Haven, turns out, is a lovely city with very beautiful blocks of brownstones and row homes. Spring in this area means every tree is in flower and there are branches bursting with white and pink blooms everywhere you look. It seems as if the flowers will just begin pouring off their trees at the rate they are blooming and dropping petals all over the bricked ground.

Their apartment is close to Yale's campus and a historical district, to boot! The park nearby is a perfect rectangle planted, at its edge, with trees bursting with soft, spring flowers. Dark pink, light pink, and white just droop off branches that sweep the grass and bricks that make up the ground. This is such a small-feeling town, and I always thought of New Haven as a big city! Goes to show...you should always stop and walk around a new town! 

Rebellion (Lies) - Arcade Fire

All I want is to be home, in my bedroom, in my bed. I have been away now for a week and am ready to be with my stuff. Not for nothin', I love my bedroom. I love my books. I love my couch and my furniture and my kitchen. I love creating art at 2 or 3 in the morning. I love staring at the streetlight that is right outside my window: the light I love to hate. I love listening to the pigeons, the cars, the sirens, the wind that rustles the power lines.

 Sundown - Gordon Lightfoot

Soon it will be summer and all the loves that I have for the Rosewood house will be transplanted and transformed to a new house. Soon I will be working at least two summer jobs, and listening to wind rustling the locust trees of the lane, watching the tide come in and go out, staring up at millions of stars every night, and spending time with friends new and old.

Take Care - Beach House

Last year, I moved everything I owned to Philadelphia from Austin. I paid lots of money and spent lots of time and anguish getting it to Philly, unpacking, arranging and making a home in a strange city. I find it hilarious, in a melodramatically tragic way, that now I am hoping to sell/donate/throw out the window almost everything that I paid about $3000 to move. After all, it is only money. After all, it is time for a clean slate. After all, it is time to shed some baggage and say....

Thanks, Rodi....

Ultimately, tomorrow begins the journey of taking a new step, a next step. Last year, I shook up my life by moving across the country to a new city that, by all accounts, did its best to test my mettle. Now I feel that Philly and I have lulled into an understanding with each other: not the all-out war I experienced at the beginning. At one point, I thought I would fight Philly. I lost. At another point, I thought I would make an altar to Philly. I realized that this would just be a mockery because I didn't really like her all that much. Hence the lull into mutual dislike.

Philadelphia - Neil Young

My brother called me the other day and I realized how excited I am to be able to live in the same town as him, even if it is only for the summer. It has been thirteen years since we lived in the same place. It has also been thirteen years since I lived in the same place as my parents. I am very nervous about living with them, even for the short time that the summer inevitably will be.

Despite the nerves, I have to remember all the experiences I had in Maine last week and how that was only in one week! The eccentricity of people, their kindness, the beauty of the place, the strange knowledge that it just might work out.....

It is time.

from Spartan Journal