How am I feeling?

It’s been a surreal couple of weeks down here in California. I’m subletting a room that is some black hole according to AT&T so I have no cell phone coverage. The Internet goes down at random times here, too. I feel disconnected, and living apart from Sky makes me feel like I’ve had some sort of drastic brain & body surgery and been separated from the rest of me.

Finding a place to live has turned out to be harder than I thought. At one point we were the top pick of someone renting out a loooovely little house with a backyard and a garage with a shop that we adored. But then some other couple offered the renter $300 above the rental price and that was that.

I can’t write about the job yet because it’s all so new and there’s so much to learn. I know once things solidify I’ll be much more excited about it – right now I just feel like a big empty head that gets filled everyday and I come home and have to stare blankly at walls for a long time before I feel like myself again.

I was driving across the Richmond Bridge this morning and had A Moment. I’d been singing along to nursery rhymes on the CD player for days, trying to memorize them for storytimes. But halfway across the bridge something snapped and I just had to listen to something else. RIGHT THEN. Luckily there was a Sleater-Kinney CD hiding in the 6 CD shuffle machine. This song came on and it so exactly expressed how I was feeling at that very moment that it bordered on eerie. I’m not usually one to post song lyrics to a blog, but in this case, I just gotta.

I spend the afternoon in cars
I sit in traffic jams for hours
Don’t push me
I am not ok

The sky is blue most every day
The lemons grow like tumors
They are tiny suns
Infused with sour

Lonely as a cloud
In the Golden State
“The coldest winter that I ever saw
Was the summer that I spent…”

Sleater-Kinney’s “Jumpers”

This all sounds so awful, right?
It’s not awful, though. I have friends here, and they’ve been around. It’s not a kind of lonely that gets fixed by having people around though, you know? It’s going to be good – I’m just in that weird in-between space where everything’s all shifty moving and settling into its place. Soon Sky’s going to be here and THE CATS are going to be here and we’re going to have a sweet little (it is the Bay Area after all) apartment with a lemon tree in the backyard. I’ll hear this song again and remember how I felt now and be happy for where I am then.