Day 17 -- Saved by insomnia and delusions of grandeur

I was lying in bed just now, trying to sleep, when it occurred to me (and feel free to ridicule me for the arrogance implicit in this train of thought) that I will leave California, and my experience here and look back on it from another life in New York, and it will be part of a personal history...and I won't have done nearly as much with it as, say, Joan Didion. Well, duh. The only good thing about that no-win sequence of scintillating nonsense is that it made me remember that, contrary to my NaBloPoMo commitment, I had failed to post today. So here I am.

I said to the H the other day that when I moved to California over fifteen years ago (it was Friday, September 13 , 1991) I never thought I'd stay here forever. And in some version of the truth, that's accurate. When I came here, to go to graduate school and pursue a now-abandoned (or at least interrupted) career, I promised myself I'd stick for five years. I had moved around a lot, both as a kid and as an adult, and I feared that my answer to malaise was simply to pack my boxes and call UPS (which, in fact, was how I often moved in those days. Not so cost effective, but hey, if most of what you own is books and kitchen paraphenalia, it can work.) But I'm not sure I thought I wouldn't stay here, either. I'm not sure I had any real ability to imagine much of a future then, and I fear that whatever imagining I did was so fantastic that even I knew, somehow, that it was unlikely to transpire.

Now I find myself on the brink of the biggest move (geographically, physically speaking, anyway) I've made in many years, and I don't have much of a fantasy about it at all. Granted, the whole thing derives from a sort of fantasy, but it's an idealizing, and opposed to a conjuring up from smoke and spells. I don't see myself becoming something new in a new place; I just see the place. I suppose I am waiting to see what I look like, once my piece of the puzzle is fitted in.