So Long Sweet Summer

It's Dashboard Confessional. I am not embarrassed. I wish it had never been laughable--the boys screaming their feelings. The popularity of emo could have been an antidote to toxic masculinity.

For every bright notebook aisle at Target, there's a new orange leaf. The darker sky. Six years ago I started grad school in Arizona. I spent most afternoons by the pool with my Theatre Histories textbook and a highlighter. Today I went to the gym's rooftop pool and read Chapter Three in my teacher's edition Theatre History textbook. It was windy, and I could only bear the chill an hour. I call the Senate Committee and my House Rep to say I support the DREAMers.

I've officially lived in Chicago longer than I was in grad school. This saddens me. It's not a surprise. I've been here, you know, watching the planner pages turn, establishing myself, signing leases. But still it happened so fast. I steadied myself on the last thing I had done. I had just moved from the desert. The other people I meet here--some spent one, two, five years in their cities, but it gets washed away in the machine of big shoulders. I join the slop.

From the moment I stepped off the plane in high school, it was my spot. It's my laptop backdrop. My blue and purple scooter plate hangs over my window. Yesterday Puhg and I went on a Labor Day run. We stopped halfway through just to sit and watch the lake. A baby regatta of boats, a seagull, a plastic bag splat into the water. He says the way I feel about our old place is how he feels about his new place.

Some days I feel it too. The neighborhood abuzz with teeny shops and how I can get from my couch to the A____ for a lime & seltzer with Flood in less than ten minutes. People feel overwhelmed by the city, but when I was in Maine I felt so weird not being able to, at any time, walk to a Walgreens. I do not think about trotting four blocks, taking the train, going down Michigan Avenue, spending thirty minutes in an interview, reversing the whole thing. It's so easy I barely pay attention. I jot lesson plans and ding my Ventra card. I'm at the library now and then I will go back across the street to my apartment, eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch, watch Friday Night Lights, and go do a show at i_.