Happy Anniversary, Minnesota

[This is a post written the day after I moved out of my apartment.]

Yesterday was the third anniversary of me being in Minnesota. On August 1, 2003, I drove into town in my Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, with my father behind me in a rented van. We had spent the last two days crossing the country to get to this small Minnesota town, and we talked over walkie-talkies the entire way. But when we finally pulled into this place, I was suddenly quiet. There was no denying it now. I had done it. I had moved away from home and to a state I knew virtually nothing about.

My father stayed two days to help me settle in. We went to Target and stocked up on supplies, food, and pots and pans. We tried some of the restaurants. We wandered the campus. We posed me in front of the fountain, in front of my picture on the faculty board, in front of the chalkboard in the very first classroom I'd ever teach.

And then he was gone, leaving me with an apartment filled with boxes yet to be unpacked and a cavernous, echoing room. I cried. I watched him drive out of the parking lot and toward the airport, and I cried. Then I went into my bedroom, sat on my bed and cried some more. I didn't like the way it sounded, the noise of my crying and its reverberation off the walls. I wanted to fill the room so it would stop sounding like that--empty, lonely, desperate.

On Sunday night, Katy, JP, and Matt helped me stuff my car with all the things I own. We clomped up and down the stairs a million times and sorted through what was absolutely necessary and what could stay until they came out to visit. Then we drank pitchers of pink lemonade and ate the frosting off a mini-chocolate cake from Walmart. There was ice cream, there was cupcakes. There was an empty living room, there were holes where my things used to be.

Then they left, and it was so quiet in my apartment. That old quiet, the one that nearly swallowed me the day I moved in. My TV was packed and my stereo too, so I had no choice but to listen to the sounds of me zipping up suitcases and spraying down the tub with Scrubbing Bubbles. Then I sat on my bed and cried.

I'm not good with silence. I haven't been good with it since my first boyfriend and I broke up. It was a loud breakup. There was screaming--lots of it--and I even threw a puzzle at him. Not very hard, of course. But it was sitting in front of me and advertising it's final put-together picture, which was the lighthouse in Maine where he took me on our first vacation together. I wanted to stab that puzzle. I wanted to break it. I wanted to tear it into smaller pieces and make him eat them. He'd cheated on me. He'd cheated on me with a girl from Eden, a girl who would go on to be a ring model at a boxing event--you know, the type that slides into the ring and holds up the sign that identifies the round.

And he and I tried to remain friends when he went on to date the girl from Eden, but that led to even more screaming and crying and my father stepping into my room one night to say, "Jessica, just hang up that phone. Just stop it now."

Which only made me cry more.

But that breakup changed everything. I used to be able to lie down in bed at night and not read, not watch a single minute of TV, not anything and be able to fall asleep. Just like that. But I found that after the breakup I needed to shut my head up or it would rattle off into a black fog of things that needed to be obsessed over. And that never helped me fall asleep.

Right after the end of our relationship I started watching TV Land late at night. I watched episode after episode of Cheers, Wings, and the Cosby Show. I watched them until everything that was buzzing inside of me shut down for the night. And then and only then could I turn the TV off and go to bed.

Over the years I've pared it down, especially since I moved to Minnesota and had to put my television out in the living room. Then it was reading before bed. Which is a much more effective use of my energy, I suppose.

But the point is this: there is never a night where I'm not doing something right before bed. There's never silence. Never. There's always TV or radio or something. But the night I moved out there was nothing. I was sitting on a bed in an empty room, which was once again echoing, and everything else was packed in my car. I had to tuck myself under the covers and sit and listen to silence. And my brain. And the occasional hiss of a locust or a cicada outside my window.

And I was thinking, Oh no. Not this again. Anything but this.

And I was thinking about the next few days, the nights I would spend sleeping on an air mattress at casa de Clay, where I would at least have a little companionship--a tiny lap dog who liked to sleep with his head propped on a pillow like he was a person--and how it would feel almost like a sleepover, how it would trick me into not being able to see ahead, all the days in my future where I would be wading through unclear moments and trying to find my way to the other side.

And I was thinking, I was the first person to move in to this apartment building.

And I was thinking, I am the only person to ever have lived in this room.

And I was thinking, I don't want to go.

And I was thinking, Don't make me go.

But I had to. And I did.