Leaving the Ward

It’s moving time again. I’ve only been living in this studio since the end of December, but my lease here ends next week. I’ve been looking at apartments, and made some calls and appointments, but it’s been slow going. House hunting is not my thing.

There has been some stress, not knowing where I am going to live next week. I haven’t been finalized for NATO yet, so I’ve been dragging my feet making any long term decisions until that gets worked out (long term meaning the next six months - after that, I still don’t know).

This apartment has been good, but this isn’t the first time that I’ve lived by myself in a studio. In January 2006 when I was living in Denver, I moved out of the apartment I shared with a roommate because I wanted to be alone; I wanted to think. I was working at the bank at the time, my third shitty job since I had arrived as a recent college graduate in Denver, and my life wasn’t working out the way I had hoped. I really didn’t have any friends in Denver, and wasn’t meeting people that I especially wanted to be friends with. I had dreams of starting a band, but the music scene was bland.

It wasn’t long before my frustration spilled over into my job, and pennies had to get thrown away. I’ve told that story enough times to anyone who would listen, so I don’t need to repeat it, but by March I had no job. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, I spent about 23 hours a day in my apartment (save 1 hour to go for a long walk every day). The apartment’s nickname became “the cell”, and I started to think about the life I wanted to live.

I decided at this point that I wanted to leave the U.S. If I was going to have a shitty job, I reasoned, I should at least be picking up a new language along the way. But I couldn’t find a way to get a job overseas. I even seriously considered the Peace Corps, ultimately deciding against it for a handful of reasons. Usually, I’m not much of a reader. But I started reading books to distract me from my thinking. It was while I was reading the tragic biography of Portland musician Elliot Smith that I had a dream one night. It was a lucid dream, rare for me, where I saw people my age flocking to Portland. (It turns out that the actual location of the place in the dream was SW 4^th and Burnside, specifically the big billboard there. I had no way of knowing that at the time.) The people told me to come to Portland. The next day when I awoke, I made plans to move out west.

I planned to stay in Portland for 3 to 4 years, then leave the U.S. Basically from the day I arrived I was planning my exit, hanging out at Chinese restaurants trying to pick up some Mandarin. And then after 4 years I did leave.

 Sometimes the plans we make come true. I haven’t had any prophetic dreams so far in the new studio, which I call the “recovery ward.” But I am not in need of any right now. Life in the ward is quite different than life in the cell. I have friends that come to visit, and have brought me dinners when it was hard to get out of bed. Friends have gone shopping for me, and helped me with laundry. I am reading, not biographies of musicians but international relations theory as I write my master’s dissertation. I have no five year plans but I trust myself to land on my feet, whatever is thrown at me in the coming months. As difficult as the six months in the cell were, looking back it turned out to be valuable time.

So that’s what’s going on right now. The knee is strong, maybe stronger than before the surgery. But stronger than the knee is the spirit, and the optimism for the future.

Knee brace.

This was taken a week ago, and the swelling has gone down a lot since. Probably because I'm constantly icing it. Probably because Brussels hasn't gotten above freezing in 2 weeks.