My Place

I didn't say a formal goodbye to my graduate university. I wasn't really sure when it was the last day. I kept remembering teeny reasons to go to campus--more annoying than sweet (return this key, drop off that book). And then suddenly I was moving, and I wasn't going back. But the day before I drove out of the desert I went to throw away my v old tennies and remembered the shoe recycling program in the gym. I had long cleaned out my locker, but I swung by, less than a day left in the state, just to drop the old soles into the bin. And then I almost cried. I got a theatre degree, and yet, I will miss that gym a dozen times more than any black box. This is the place I trained for marathon number two and where I spent hours on bikes reading Atlas Shrugged before classes started when I had no homework or friends.  This is every 6 AM my first spring before I had an iPad when I had to settle for closed captioning of that dumb Amanda Bynes sit-com. Backstroke with palm trees smiling down. Step class that launched me into graduation. Midday showers on the hottest of hot full days. Every Wednesday on ellipticals reading my peers' plays. Those Saturday nights when I was a single girl trying to get a lift workout in before close. Those Sunday mornings ramping up adrenaline before improv rehearsal. I swallowed because I had so much more packing left and I'd been doing pretty well not crying.

Open road, leaving AZ.

Sometimes I find myself shakin' in the middle in the night

and then it hits me and I can't even believe this is my life.

Something Is Not the Same

When I was 18 I performed in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Before the festival, my cast did some Shakespeare classes at the Globe.
One day after class we went shopping.
I was being a cheapskate in preparation for college.
I only looked at sale racks.
Everything was still too expensive.
Then, in one boutique, I found one solitary pair of jeans for just five pounds!
By a stoke of magic luck, they fit!
I loved the heck out of my London jeans.
Until I gained the freshman thirty.
Boop.
I got rid of my little girl clothes as my hips rolled out and my shoulders pulled up.
I put the jeans in storage.
Training for the marathon transformed my body like college did.
I don't look like I'm 18, but somehow the jeans fit again.
A little snugger, a little shapelier.
I also have a pair of green tennies from 2004.
My sister wants me to throw them away. Holes.
I wore them yesterday because it was one of those holes-in-your-shoes days.
I looked down at my ankles at the end of my acting seminar class.
The professor was my professor in Acting I.
The first class I took in college.
The green toes, the London hem.
From the knees down, I was a freshman again.
We're freshmen at life, my friends joke
and my clothes agree.


London jeans! In Scotland! When they were new!

It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes, and leap.