I’m in Arizona again. I was going to keep this fact a secret, to hole up at my mother’s house and sunbathe and get caught up on work without feeling obligated to make time for my AZ friends, but I’m bad at secrets. So I just emailed them all and was like “Hey. I’m here. I’m not going to see you. Or anyone. Still love you. That’s all.” I’m happy that I’ll be here for Yom Kippur, and that I’m getting the opportunity to plow through my devastating workload without distractions.
It’s phenomenal how much I can get done with the following things:
1) Ready availability of food, shopped for and prepared by my mother
2) A living space that is always magically clean and smells lovely without any effort on my part
3) Another person to walk and play with Leo
4) Someone small who I can always pick on to feel better about myself when I feel bad (my mother)
5) Someone who knows me better than anyone on the planet to offer loving advice and encouragement when I feel bad, despite how relentlessly I may have picked on her an hour ago (also my mother)
6) Regular visits to Crossfit, where I spend way too much time trying not to puke to worry about my workload.
7) The desert. The jagged, rising mountains, shadows against the sunset and and the gravel. The cacti. These landscapes I found so abhorrent and dull as a child now bring me peace.
8) The Arizona sun, the kind of sun that emits beams of light that hit you with such clarity that you remember that you are one of them, that you are a beam of light, that you are a part of something much greater than the confines of your body and your distorted mind, that you are safe. That you are loved. That you are loved and protected by this greater thing, this thing with this warmth, this warmth that lands on your skin like an old friend, this thing that is here to remind you that you are not alone.
And without the following things:
1) Regular access to television.
2) Work events at which I feel I must appear
3) Social events at which I feel I must appear
4) 8,000 live-in animals who expect always to be fed and attended to
5) The stillness of the air in my apartment of Seattle, the lingering of failures past, the thickness of it all, the suffocating stench of career, relationship, personal corpses, the whirlwind that traps and immobilizes me. I used to feel this way about my mother’s house. I couldn’t be here. There were too many ghosts here. There were years and years that I couldn’t spend the night here. Those days are gone. Today this house is comforting. Today those ghosts live with me in Seattle. The ghosts, you see, moved with me. More specifically: The ghosts are created by me. I create the ghosts, the spectres that haunt and stifle me. I don’t know how I create them and I don’t know how to stop and I don’t know how to make them go away once they’re here.
It’s good here right now. I’m getting a lot done. I’m processing a lot. I get all my sins forgiven on Saturday. I would move back to Arizona but I don’t want to let the ghosts get their hands on this place. It’s so nice.
