...Ready for it

Today, I've been a bit confused.

The calendar says it's Halloween. So too do the dishes of candy and chocolates, scattered about work, and all of the wee buggers, trotting about in their various costumes. But when I step outside, what I think is, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!"

As much as I love this place, I can't deny the fact that most of my life has been spent in warm climates. 19 years in Florida, most Halloweens being gross and humid. 9 years in California, most Halloweens being toasty and "oh it's a dry heat" and still feeling like hell. So when I step outside on Halloween morn, and see that my windshield is coated in a layer of ice, and realize that my long wool coat might not be enough to withstand the morning's chill...I'm a little con-fuddled. My body, my personal history, they tell me it's Christmas, even though my life now tells me, "Happy Halloweenie!"

(It's also worth mentioning that we are forecasted to get a wintry mix of precipitation late tonight. YAAAAAAAAAS.)

What I've noticed is that October tends to be a pretty busy time for me--even without the job and two side-hustles I've got going on right now. I'd love to say that I read a dozen books and cooked some amazing meals and crafted some lovely creations and so on, but that's just not the case. I do my work--buying media (we are at the end of the spending cycle), teaching my class, doing a bit of caregiving for my former boss. I socialize with my aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Indiana and their son, and a few other friends. I pursue some fall adventures, like watching scary movies and frolicking in a picked-over orchard. I scold the cats and watch "The West Wing" and think about simpler presidencies, and I try to enjoy the fall as it creeps in.

I attend an utterly magical play with my D'uncle, and remember the line, "It's supposed to hurt...that's how you know it meant something."

I laugh with my friends, and try to focus on the day at hand, and not look back too much on past Octobers, or worry too much about Octobers ahead. I love the thought of homes, cozy and welcoming in the darkening nights; I turn my collar up and face the cold. Some folks believe that Halloween is the witch's New Year, and while I haven't been witchy-poo enough in a long time to adhere to that, a very big part of me hopes that this Halloween is a new year, and that the various shit--physical sickness, political insanity, personal betrayals and disappointments--that have sprung up since last October are now drawing to their close. We will see.

But I gotta admit...I'm ready for it.

There are many, many things that I disliked about my California exile. One of the more ironic things (given my line of work) that plagued my time there was the fact that I was never able to get a good book club going. What makes a good book club? Good books, good wine, good snacks...and good people who, you know, actually read the book. I eventually got fed up with the women who turned up and said sheepishly, "I didn't get a chance to read the book this month..."

A couple of months back, when I was working the Reference Desk, I helped a woman find a book. She mentioned that it was for her book club.

"Oooh, where's your book club?"

An impish smile tugged at her lips. "It's just me and my friends." She paused, lowered her voice. "We call it Read The Book Or Get The Fuck Out."

I've found my people.

Last Wednesday, on a weirdly stormy evening, I went to C3, a pretentious neighborhood (not my neighborhood) bar for the first book group meeting of the year. Other than the woman who originally told me about their group, I hadn't met any of the other members. Yet within a few minutes of meeting these women, I plunged into a fantastic conversation about books. Is there anything better than talking about books? 

Eventually, we got around to talking a little about the books--The Glass Castle and Echo--one of which we each had to read. Here's the funniest part about the whole evening--we probably spent 5, 10 minutes, tops, talking about those specific books. And then we went back to talking about other books. But hey, we all read the books we were supposed to. None of us had to get the fuck out. 

The evening was a long one, filled with lots of conversation. I talked--I'm good at that--but I also spent a lot of time listening and observing these women. We ranged in age, from 34 to 44. All of these lovely ladies sported sparkling diamond rings on their wedding ring finger. Most of them spoke of children. All of them spoke pretty lovingly about their husbands, their shared lives and interests. 

What is that? Speaking to these women, I felt like I was catching a glimpse of some sort of weird, parallel universe. Like I was this close to being one of these women, but for some quirk, some twist of timing and fate, I missed the boat that was sailing towards Normal Life Isle.

Do I miss that sort of life? Sometimes I do. That night, I did.

I read to hear stories about other people, to gain insights, to re-learn empathy, to travel outside my own head, to ponder different possibilities. And that night last week--and many nights in the future, I hope--I didn't need the books to ponder different possibilities. Those lovely ladies gave me a glimpse into another world. I'm not sure I want that world, but I'm not turning away from it just yet, either. And I'm definitely not going to get the fuck out. 

Is anyone else familiar with your first night of sleep after a painful breakup?

I am. And no matter how many times I go through a breakup, that first night of sleep is always the worst. Inevitably, I wake up at arse-o'clock in the morning, and am struck by my new reality, which results in a gaping hole in my heart, with hot tears trickling down my cheeks, with a hundred thoughts and a thousand regrets.

Last Saturday, I kind of went through that again.

It was a new feeling, though, because I hadn't broken up with anyone, or been dumped. Not with a person, anyway. But I had left something the night before--after a flurry of last-minute deadlines, after a big going-away party, and amidst sincere and sometimes tearful speeches, and generous gifts, and more than a few chuckles over shared memories, I walked away from the job that I had held for the last 8.5 years. The first really stable job of my life, the first really substantial job of my career, the source of my emotional stability for the longest time, and I left it.

And so, at 5 AM Saturday morning, I awoke abruptly, my heart pounding, and while I wasn't crying or devastated, I was still...lost. I spent the next hour trying to go over all the final details in my head, all the jobs and duties and responsibilities and commitments, all the people that I had worked with. And then I thought about the next few weeks, before I start my new job, and really, the next...well, lifetime ahead of me without this job I had just left.

I'm like a moon who has lost its planet to orbit around, I thought, with maybe more than a little self-pity. I had lost my gravitational pull, the thing that had kept me on course.

Maybe I will have it again. Heck, likely I will have it again. It's going to take time, though, just as it took time for Fancy Desert Library to become the center of my Universe. And I suppose, in the meantime, I can only concentrate on avoiding what Eldest Sister conjectured when I gave her my "moon lacking a planet" hypothesis:

"Well, what happens when a moon loses its source of a gravitational pull? It continues to spin pointlessly until it veers of course and crashes into another planet and kills millions of people."

Going through the Library tonight, checking the doors and locks and preparing to close the same as I have done hundreds of times over the past eight years, it occurred to me that it feels a little like the end is close–closer than I think. Or maybe I am just gently, slowly detaching. Kind of like that X-Files episode, where Scully was caught between life and death, and deciding if she wanted to cut the rope from the people who loved her, and drift away to whatever came next, or be reeled back into shore. 

I don’t know when the end will come, when I will leave the Library and California, and this life that I have grown accustomed to, but I want to be emotionally ready when that happens. 

(And no, this is not a post about suicide. Don’t worry, folks, it’s a post about moving home.)