Packing, Day One

And so it starts.

Things are beginning to wind down here in Minnesota. I've got a living room full of empty banana boxes from the grocery store, and they're waiting to be filled with the things I've nested in this apartment over the last three years.

I didn't cry even once tonight when I dragged those boxes in my room and started tucking away photos and candles and winter clothes. It's a miracle, really, that I didn't cry. I've been tearing up for anything lately. The other day I started crying at a commercial that ended up being for adult diapers. That's when I broke out the wine.

Often I don't even know why I'm crying. Sometimes it's about the clouds over the Mankato water tower or the curve in the road on the way back to my apartment, the way I could drive it with my eyes closed because it feels like I've been doing it my whole life. Sometimes it's about my friends and how I'm this close to being taken away from them. Sometimes it has to do with my thinking about MSU classes starting in August and me not being here to run up the front steps of Armstrong Hall toward a classroom of sleepy and sweet Midwesterners.

And sometimes it's Wily Republican related. I have virtually no memories from this past year that involve him, except for my thesis reading, which was the first time I'd seen him in many months, but I'm missing him and digging deep for the old things that kept me warm and happy in my first two years here. I miss the old Wily, what with his binge drinking and his Biology homework and his big, soft bed. This new one isn't the same boy I knew back then. This one has a full-time job, a squad car, and a girlfriend. He no longer calls me at 2:30 in the morning to tell me he's sitting in the flower bed outside the bar and that he wants to buy me cheesebread. This is unfortunate, because I love cheesebread. On Wednesday he and I are going to see each other for the last time. I'm guessing forever. It's the first in the series of my Big Goodbyes.

But tonight I was reminded of my last round of Big Goodbyes when I unearthed old college papers and workshop comments from my undergraduate career. Even further down I found novels I'd written in high school. The next layer featured the novels from middle school. I guess I'm what you could call prolific.

These stories are priceless. Mainly because I constructed covers for them with whatever limited resources I had at my technological disposal at that point in the early 90s. This means that the cover of, say, Mercy--the novel I wrote about a girl whose boyfriend dies in a car crash and afterward she falls in love with her best friend's brother, Cherokee, who they call Cherry--features a 80 point font choice in curvy curliques and the worst clip art ever. A couple caught mid-tango. There is absolutely no tangoing in Mercy. There is, however, jet-skiing on lakes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a scene that involves a weeping willow. Back then I was a big fan of weeping willows in my stories. Also men with bad names. Greg would argue that I still have a problem naming my characters (I'm thinking specifically of the latest story I'm working on, which features a boy named Packer), but I was even worse back then. I can only imagine what he would think of the name of the best male character I ever created--the man of my dreams, Ollie Covet.

That's right. I found parts of my very first novel, Jessie and Ollie, underneath everything else. And there he was on the page: Oliver Covet, the one, the only, the completely badass. He's everything I could ever hope for in a man. He's witty, he's charming, he's tall, he's smart. He is the crew chief for the main character's race team. You have to realize this was written in the time when things were all mixed up in my head. I saw visions of an apartment in Charlotte, a job writing for NASCAR Illustrated, and marrying this man or this man. (P.S.- Jeff Gordon, that is most certainly not me in that photo, and if you're going to be dating someone taller than you, I suggest it be me.)

It's funny how things turn out, because here I am in Minnesota. I am graduated. I am degreed. I am a teacher. I am packing old loves away in the back of my heart. I am telling myself it's time to go. My room is a mess, and so am I. But I'm packing boxes and wondering how I'm going to feel next month, the next, and the next after that.