Pretty Good Year

I realized on Friday that it’s been exactly one year since we closed on this house. Exactly one year since we made the irrevocable decision to leave our home and move to this odd little state, and honestly? It’s fucking weird. There are moments where it feels like it hasn’t been but five minutes that we’ve lived here, and there are days – days like this weekend, mostly – that I think that I’ve been here an eternity, and I’m not sure I can take another moment of it.

And so, to deflect any agony I feel at being the girl with giant glasses who wasn’t invited to prom while you all Blog your Blog Her-ing and I sit here, meeting no one except for the lady at the grocery store, I will calmly, and not-at-all-tearfully note: what a year it’s been. We’ve danced with Southerners and played bingo with the elderly and talked about shooting squirrels and met Janet Reno and Michael Shiavo and learned how to kayak and got a dog and thought about having babies and learned how to tile the floor and got a new job and ate at new restaraunts and went to the beach and watched the sunset. And we’ve learned a lot.

I’ve re-learned that I am married to the right person. You can’t live in complete isolation with a mistake. Add a pile of outside stressors, like loneliness, depression, career crises, isolation and a raging anxiety disorder and it’s a miracle we haven’t killed each other. But we haven’t! And in fact, we’ve gotten better! Yes, better! I hate to go all sappy on you and all, but I really do love my husband, and God, I’m so freaking lucky. It’s been the two of us against the rest of this odd little world for a year. No friends. No family. And we’ve done pretty well, I think. And yet, I laugh every day because of him. Because of him, I’m on a different path in life – he made me quit my horrendous job and get a new one that I loved – even though it meant a pay cut of astronomical proportions – just so that I would be happy. I married someone who would never want anything for me other than what made me happy, and I didn’t realize how huge that was until I was completely alone with him. And that’s pretty fucking cool.

I got a new job. A job that pays me less, less, less and did I mention LESS? than half or even, um, one third, of what I made before, and a job that most college students could probably handle. But dude, I write – WRITE! – for a living now (along with various and sundry other administrative tasks, which I also love), and I love it, and the salary really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I can freelance anywhere now, and I didn’t have that before. And the golden handcuffs of a gloriously inflated corporate salary? Gone. I can subsist on mere pennies now, thank you, and I will.

But God, it’s so hard sometimes. The amount of money we spend on travel just for baseline activities like weddings and family gatherings, etc. that we used to just DRIVE to, would make your head spin. The fact that we have no one to watch our dog when we go away or anyone even to pick up our paper and get the mail is pretty awful. It’s been a year, and we still don’t have any friends, which makes me feel so…God, it makes me feel a lot of things. It would be one thing if I was meeting all of these people I liked and wanted to be friends with and they just didn’t like me. I could control it, whatever “it” was. But I’ve met exactly no one, which feels like staring out into the barren wasteland of the cold west watching the tumbleweeds fly by like giant rolls of hay.

There are long, hard stretches of days where I don’t talk to anyone but Adam and my colleagues, that make me want to put my head in my hands and just sob until I can’t breathe, and sometimes that’s exactly what I do. Sometimes it feels like life is just driving by in a glass bus. I can see in – can see the people inside talking to each other, laughing and interacting and functioning in a world that doesn’t revolve around the VFW’s activities calendar – but I can’t be a part of it. I can’t play.

It’s been an odd year. A year of working, playing, relaxing on the beach. A year without family, friends or any outside contact. But it’s been a good year – a year of odd little unexpected gifts and joy and happy days with my husband and dog beach and kayaking and all the beautiful things that we love. And when it is over, I think in an odd little way, if we ever leave here, we will miss it.

P.S. I think if I’d realized our lovely Sarcomical was going to alight me with such kind words, I might have written a less maudlin post that doesn’t make people want to stab me with white-hot knives of asympathetic frustration.

P.P.S. BlogHer 07 in Chicago? That’s not east. That’s midwest. THAT IS NOT EAST. Don’t lie to us and say you’re “bringing it east” when that IS NOT EAST. “Business” conference in New York my ass. Splitting them was not a wise move, if you ask me. But no one did.

**Tori Amos

22 comments July 31st, 2006