Somewhere Between

I left Madison over a month ago. Now, I'm halfway through a 7-week stretch of teaching Creative Writing at a summer camp for gifted youth, which has been a lot of fun (and a lot of work, but mostly a lot of fun). Middle schoolers are hilarious, awkwardly somewhere between children and teenagers, and surprisingly aware of the world around them.

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I totaled my car on the way down from Wisconsin. It wasn't a collision, thankfully. Apparently, the Wisconsin winters rusted out my undercarriage, which collapsed, essentially, and there's no fixing that. It happened less than an hour into our 17 hour drive. Brandon and I repacked a rental, sold my poor Effie White for a few hundred bucks, and continued on our way, pulling into Athens around sunrise. 

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So now I'm in Davidson, NC, without a car, which is a lot like being in rural Maine without a car, which is a lot like spending most of my money at CVS for things like packaged food because that's all there really is here. It was a good lesson in letting go of control and adapting. I came here from Athens to Davidson on a Megabus with my backpack and have been improvising since. 

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As soon as I leave Davidson, it's going to be a fury of miles: Driving a U-haul and Brandon's car from Georgia to Oklahoma, dropping off three sassy cats, driving the U-haul and Brandon's car to California, hopefully securing a place, dropping the U-Haul off and unloading everything into a storage unit, and driving with Brandon in his car back to Oklahoma. Then I'm flying to Vermont for Breadloaf, driving to Maine for the quickest visit home ever, flying back to Oklahoma, collecting those three sassy cats and Brandon and  moving to the Bay area for good. If anyone has a better plan, please let me know!

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My birthday is in 5 days. Quarter-century! It's a weird age. I feel too old to be reckless and do stupid things, like smoke cloves on a fire escape with my best friends until morning. Too young for the old milestones that defined adulthood: houses, careers, babies. It's an age of between. 

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Being 25 is like being a middle schooler, in most ways.

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I've gotten used to being unsettled. I was at a baseball game with the summer camp last night, and I couldn't care less about the game, and I couldn't stop looking at the moon, which was beautiful last night, and thinking about how we live on a planet, and how that planet is always turning, and how we're always in motion, even when we stand still.