The last time I mull these things over. The last time I take my thoughts to the past ...

Returning to the east unnerved me. Though I was exhausted, though I craved the company of friends, I felt sadness for the closing of another fleeting episode that I alone would recall. The clustered highways assaulted me and I felt all of my hardness flood back. Immediately, everyone I encountered talked endlessly about money. Getting it, not having it, stressing about it. I had not realized until that moment how much people out here, particularly in the northeast, concentrate on money. I'd allowed myself to forget the way it completely rules people's lives in Boston, and Connecticut, and New York. How it's directly connected to status – as it is everywhere, but so much more transparently here. Money. How disgusting that we should waste a second of our lives moaning about it!

I landed in Atlanta high strung from the ride and spend a few days with an old martial arts friend. Due to a cataclysmic series of events, he was forced to break ties with the organization and the school he was formerly affiliated with for nearly 20 years and had joined forces with a talented Tae Kwon Do master. My stops in martial arts schools throughout the trip were tense due to my own chaotic relationship with training, and the seemingly relentless pressure of people within the community that I hurry up and get through this self-exploration business and test for my Sam Dan. As a self-assured practitioner not too long ago, I recognized that they were merely trying to encourage me, and maybe make some conversation, but at the same time I felt it was impossible to explain the immense disillusionment that had overtaken not only my martial arts training, but my entire life. Everything I'd trusted –- even unknowingly — had crumbled around me, and my closest friend for many years in martial arts and life in general betrayed me for foolish, pitiful, and selfish reasons. Reality had distorted, and circumstances of my life reminded me again and again that I was virtually alone in this, whatever it was. I had no choice but to follow this path, wherever it might take me. It was the road to my survival.

The days were pleasant and everyone treated me kindly. I learned to throw ninja stars and muddled my way through some basics with various weapons I'd never encountered in my empty hands style. We feasted on Korean food and Master C. took a liking to me. He offered me a job, but I was committed to my Asheville plan. Now is not the time to make such a bold move. Finally relenting, he said, “Well, whatever you do, you should consider martial arts. You're good at it.”

...

Finding an apartment in Asheville had its ups and downs. Everyone I spoke to wanted to rent immediately and seemed confused by the fact that I was trying to look for a place ahead of when I intended to move some 800 miles. Some were concerned I would never find a job, and to be honest, I was too. But a few Boston friends relocated here and they all agreed upon two things: The money here is not as good, but it is substantially easier to find work and keep work than it is in Boston. Given my lifestyle in Boston was pretty much to piece together a range of low paying part time jobs, I figure I can swing it here with the cheaper rent. The fact that I'm college educated might score me some points for once and hey, maybe I'll get lucky and secure real work at some point, though the landscape seems bleak.

I ended up settling on a one bedroom in West Asheville. The perfect combination of urban and private: with a porch, some trees, a driveway, a small patch of grass, and no neighbors above or below me. It's walking distance to $1.50 tamales, a pub, a café or two, the grocery store, and I imagine my bike will come in handy for trips to downtown where parking can be a confusing hassle. The choice to have no roommates was an obvious one for me. Although I've had almost all positive living situations with roommates and sharing rent would be a tremendous break for my finances, I've managed to stumble through over 30 different roommates in five years and the constant change has become exhausting. I may want to share a house again, I may need to share a house again. Just now, for this time, while I can – regroup, decompress, clarify, sit.

I stayed for ten days at my friend's home in Swannanoa. The house is a constant evolution and at times has had anywhere from three to eight tenants all throwing together their pennies for rent. They have a big garden and brew their own beer and haven't bothered to turn on the heat. I am reminded of a time in my life when I lived a winter in a house with no heat. A space I'd been running from that laps my ankles again, demanding answers. My friend is absorbed in a certain dilemma, and it calls to the surface all of the things I'd meant to free myself of and I thought, I'm making no progress at all.

Every day I woke early and worked on the housing or the job or made myself an egg and sat out on the porch in the sunlight. At first I wasn't so sure about this new life. Moving from a city to a town rural like the one I grew up in and I panic about all of the adjustments I'll have to make. I miss Boston fleetingly. But by the time I'm due to leave Asheville, I feel as I've been there a century and that I don't want to go. My car even does a tricky thing at the gas station before my departure, and for twenty minutes of jostling, I can't turn the key.

I had missed the peak of autumn and the maples up North, but the Blue Ridge Mountains were still exploding with color. We drove the Blue Ridge Parkway and took a number of small hikes, my favorite of which was the one where we scrambled along a trail that shot straight up the mountain. We never found it, but there is supposedly a pool over the crest of the hill. The view was beautiful – orange and yellow still, down in this part of the range where the elevation must be a bit lower than some places where the trees were nearly bare.

There is some kind of magic happening in Asheville right now. Maybe it was always happening in Asheville. A new population is moving in, and I'm a part of it. After several days, having been where I've been and the need to sit down somewhere dominating the desire to keep moving, I decide that it's one of the better places to live, and that it will work for me. Better here than Boston, or home. Perfect weather, a city — but in the country, a lively culture, sustainable and eco-living emphasizing, pleasant, peaceful... a place where I could learn. A place to be different than what I was.

I really am like a snake or a hermit crab or any kind of animal that takes off layers or finds a different shell or gets away with being unrecognizable to its former selves.

...

It's two days to drive back home, where I will spend the month of winter holidays before making the permanent move. The weather isn't bad, really, and I see a surprising amount of foliage the whole way back until I'm just north of New York City — the biting cold, gray dull trees, and a 4:30pm sunset ringing in the immediate winter. I'd largely missed the transitional phase.

I go all the way to Boston, ready to see my friends and do all those things we used to do. There are parties all weekend in art houses and there's an ill-considered night or two of box wine and seeing everyone is so great, but the oppressive force of the place finds me quickly and I find I have to leave after only five days. Being there makes me feel lonely and anxious, and even though I thought I'd be all about coming back for another round of goodbyes, I'm pretty sure I never want to go back again. The aggravation of parking and driving around the clusterfuck streets, and just the depth of depression and misery on the faces of the people who ride the T. God help me. How can it be that this city emanates such hopelessness? The education and the wealth and all of the social programs and everything that everyone has there are lost to this gravity. Like walking through molasses. It's a lifestyle of self-sustaining and self serving and surviving by exerting the least amount of effort you possibly can. No use in it. All of the energy you put into this place gets sucked straight out, swimming around in this vortex where even if you do get the help you need it's somehow going to fuck you in the end. And it always does.

It is a relief to return home to Connecticut and rest a while. I haven't spent this much time here since I last lived here for the summer in 2006 and it's been fun to catch up with old friends. Though, the main content of this return, this trip, this whole phase of my life has been harder to express.

I left Boston because I was miserable there, this much is obvious. I got in touch with old friends from all over the United States who carried me over for most of my trip. The first thing I noticed, after a few visits, was that I had forgotten what it felt like to have an impact on someone else's life. My friend Dana in Cincinatti and I had never met before. We met online in 1999 and kept in touch all these years and she had a shoebox full of letters and drawings from all of her friends during that time. The things she collected and the life she led was majorly impacted by what was born then – as was my own. The next friend that I met, Meg in Minneapolis, had visited me in Connecticut when we were both seventeen via Greyhound bus. We spent two weeks going to New York City and back to see shows, which was how I lived back then. This trip changed her life. It was the first time she'd seen the ocean, or been anywhere near a city like New York and the last time she saw her father. Margo in Arizona told me I gave her her nickname, Marz, though I didn't remember, and she had a tattoo of something I drew on her ankle. I felt so lucky to have so many friends and memories in all of these places — Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Portland... I had no idea that I'd meant so much to them until suddenly I was in their towns, and they had anticipated me, each one with something to show me, with stories to tell about the past decade, and how we'd all gone from childhood into our own kind of adult.

It was strange to see all of these elements of who I am in this way, these old friends who had molded me and fallen away, whose quirks and eccentricities I acquired and whose lives were like the complete version of each facet I never bothered to develop. I knew I had sought them. Since I was twelve it had been my dream to travel the country, and I knew one day I'd get to, and that I'd stop at the homes of these people who I had known in the depth of this or that obsession, I just never knew how many years it would be and what those years would do to our lives. It was important for me to see them now and be reminded of who I was, that I was loved, and what it is that makes me a complete person. The diversity of people that I've known and loved has always been my greatest blessing. They remind me that there are a thousand lives to live.

I felt it float me back to earth, as I had started my trip, and lived the prior year of my life in a dream state. It seemed to be happening, and that I had been responsible, but I was floating, unattached. I feared in a way that I never have that I might disappear. That nothing was real. I felt that for five years almost all of the relationships I'd established were false, fleeting, or that I was disposable to people I cared about. Intentional or not, my life had been riddled with miscommunication, confusion, and deception and I'd come away from it deeply mistrustful. I had nothing to offer employers, most people I met were indifferent and found me sort of strange, and after so many attempts at making the right connections I resigned myself to being alone and in some ways, have learned to thwart others' interest in me, so that they'd leave me alone. There was all this nervous chatter in my head, constant distraction, and I felt I'd made too many mistakes that I couldn't forgive yet. I needed silence. I needed to be free of the onslaught of everything – the constant sweeping change, and all of the people who only knew me long enough to make up their mind about it and to whom I could never adequately articulate the shifts. From the outside the whole thing is suspect, I realize that. Reconnecting with people who knew me for many years allowed events of my life to come into perspective. I saw the various paths I could have taken and recognized the ways they were not right for me, even if I initially lamented leaving them behind. I met with uncomfortable aspects of my past and in some parking lots, some highways, some long open skies, I was able to put them to rest. Forgive them. Tie a bow around some loose ends.

Others will take more time.

In Connecticut, I have nothing to do but spend the long days mulling over my old life here with old friends and writing. One thing that nagged me for a long time was whether I had made the right decision to leave and finally, I know that I had. It was strange and difficult to readjust to life up here – to the money, to the privilege I was brought up in and all that it brings with it. In Boston, I'd been surrounded by and immersed in a working class culture and a highly stressed economic situation. A large percentage of my friends were unemployed and their industries all but vaporized. For those who could manage to avoid doing what I did — riding haphazard through all of the worst jobs around — it took their eighteen months of government checks to finally set them up in some retail gig after giving up hope in returning to their field. Most will have to move, or have already left. Here in Connecticut and any place in proximity to New York City, the struggle for work seems more perceived than real. The area has no doubt suffered losses, and it is felt, but nobody I know here has endured a period of unemployment at length and the quality of life seems only vaguely less brazen. My town is expanding infrastructure and opening new businesses. Everyone still gulps down gallons of expensive French wine and parks their SUV crooked over two spaces. Restaurants are quieter, but no less expensive. And it just feels strange to me to be in this kind of place at this time. Like everything else has changed, but somehow, this hasn't. I feel I've finally forgiven myself for the life I have been allowed by my family, though some days I look at all I have and feel like a traitor.

I'm about to move down south to a place that resembles more of the rest of America, and live my life of pulling it all together on a thread. When I look back, I know I've made wise investments and that I have lived out every one of my gifts to the highest of my abilities. I don't regret a single thing about how I have lived my life knowing that its aims have always been towards growth and with intention to share. For the most part, these intentions have been realized and I have done as I said I would. I've been lucky in this life to start out with a lot. That means it is important that I give so much more. I don't know how that manifests yet, and I guess my most recent realization is that all I've done and all I plan to do is integral to what it is I'm supposed to do, and this, I can accept, is not a waste.

I am at peace with who I am. For the first time in five years. In seven. In nine. And I am relieved of so many of the fears, anxieties, and troubles which dominated my thoughts, my speech, and hindered my ability to act on new projects, have reciprocal friendships, and see the truth. I no longer look in the mirror and see the distorted image, and there have been days lately, where I even see the perfection of this life distill before me.

There remain obstacles, of course, and knots of confusion that haven't been teased out. The real challenge is starting from zero, with humility, and there are many days where I feel ill equipped for tasks ahead. I wonder if I'll ever have a sustaining relationship again, be close to someone, and fall in love. I wonder if I'll ever have a career, and if I'll hack it in a creative field. I wonder if I'll have the patience to learn an instrument again, or get back in shape, or really work on learning a trade. I feel rusty as a writer, unworthy as a photographer, and incapable as a musician. I worry that clarity about my goals will never come and that I'm doomed to live out my days in this haphazard manner, alone, unproductive, three steps from success. I'm never certain if I'm doing this right, or if people care about what I have to say, and I worry all of the time about that line between being true to myself and deluding myself. I worry, most of all, that my past knowledge will feed apprehensions about the present, and that life will cease to surprise me the way it did when I hadn't done this yet.

And then I know, of course, that these are not extraordinary concerns. They are the average ones. The ones that everyone has, and the ones I'm to sort out in these coming years to manifest whatever it is I'm meaning to create. And then live with the fact that maybe I'm outrageously boring.

...

Yesterday was the first snow in Connecticut. I drove home, late, from a friend's house, taking hairpin turns and sliding through stop signs, listening to the kind of music that this sort of driving calls for. You know, it's been five years since I've driven in the snow. It reminds me of high school, and the winter of 2005 making snow angels in parking lots on first dates. I drove in the snow many nights that winter.

There's something about snow that makes everything okay. I suppose it is the softness. The way you forget the cold.

I think I'm going to miss the late flurries in Boston. Always walking some distance, in the middle of unplowed squares, 3am. The city, silent, the only time it is ever silent.

Those walks will always be sweet in my memory.

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