A long series of goodbyes

Last day with my favorite lawyers.

It isn't easy to say goodbye…

to a life put together with intention.

to a job that fit like a second skin.

to an identity that felt real.

to a city that pulsed through my veins.

to a routine that gave comfort.

I've been doing my best to adjust to a new place… self… way of being. Which more often than not feels like an adjustment to a lack of what was than to what is. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time missing my old work. It was a dream job in so many ways:  my own office, a feeling of competence that comes from working in one place for almost 14 years, a flexible schedule, amazing co-workers, interesting work, and a livable salary + benefits. I could walk around the city in my black boots, listening to music, getting tattooed by one of the best in the world, meeting weird people. I THRIVED in that space. It breathed life into me for many years. And in the end, it told me to leave.

The energy I spent simply to recover from the onslaught of everyone else's energy in a densely-populated, ever-moving metropolitan area was overwhelming. I'm glad I noticed this enough to make this move, and now-- almost 7 months out, I can feel it in a much bigger way. I've had real space to think, to feel. (An unexpected summer off was a most amazing gift.) The nearest city is really just a town, and there are miles of country road between us. 

In all this, I've been fighting the adjustment to the new. Was it the right move, or were we completely wrong to pack it all in to be in the woods for a new pace of life? I haven't been able to write about it in the not-knowing. I needed to know. I needed to have a "real" job. I had to be happy first. Guess what? Things didn't fall into place the way I expected. I had to work my ass off at a temp job before I found work I really wanted. It's part time, and it doesn't pay me enough-- yet. But it challenges me, it's changing me, and I really like it. 

As for knowing whether this was the right move? In that space between April and November, after goodbye upon goodbye to what was, I've been working out an answer. This answer comes sharply each time I think about visiting not just my memories, but the city in the flesh: my body says no. Each time we return from picking up or dropping off Leah with her dad at our halfway meeting point, I breathe such a sign of relief. My body relaxes. I am home.

Tuckered

My wife + me on Saturday eve after packing, loading, driving, unloading.
(photo by Susan Wolfe)

It's done!

We've moved most of the contents of our home to Massachusetts, and holy cannoli, am I tired. Also beyond grateful, for all the help from amazing friends and family with loading + unloading that 16-foot sucker (i.e., "truck")… cooking us food and making our new house feel like a home — complete with ukulele serenading.

After returning the truck, we relinquished a boatload of forms to the local school and — voilà! The girl is registered to start learning, Massachusetts-style, in less than three weeks. Then I was lucky enough to meet with a fabulous entertainment attorney in town, and we hope to do some work together. Exciting!

And today, I'm crying over things like… air. The way the light falls on the sidewalk. Beautiful people telling the full-stop truth. You know. Little-big things. I don't know if it's the moving itself (which some people say is one of the Top Difficult Life Events) or the back-and-forth between two very different environs, or what. But man, I feel raw. My body hurts, my head is full of too many thoughts, and my heart is feeling all of what it will right in the thick of this goodbye process.  

Five more days of work after today, and then we go, for good.  I can see the bottoms of all my desk drawers, which hasn't happened since I first moved into this office 10+ years ago. Which makes my heart beat faster.

HappyExcitedTiredSorePanickedScaredReadyExhilaratedSoon

More dispatches from the train

Brassaï: from his exhibition "For the Love of Paris”

Yesterday, after a day spent packing up most of my office:

I'm on a train easing slowly through the bowels of Penn Station. Overhead, lights cast a brilliant sheen on metal surfaces of stationary train cars and snaking tracks. My brain, in hardcore farewell mode, filters this scene as unbelievably gorgeous, like Paris (I imagine) in the rain.

The way the early-evening light filters through I-beams, as we pause in the spot where spiky city skyline emerges before we plunge into the tunnel, breaks my heart open.

I feel the bulk of a beautifully worn radio tuner at my feet, third in a series of heavy audio pieces being carefully lugged home each evening I can manage to find a ride home from the station.

I find these once commonplace moments to be startlingly heartbreaking. My heart opens wide to catch these last few drops on this side of my life.

I feel a bit ridiculous but also unbelievably lucky.  How often do we get to fully inhabit these moments of our lives? Saying goodbye to the here and now is one of the best ways to appreciate it, no?

* * * * *

And now, at home the day before we load up a 16-foot truck, I pack some more! Soon I'll be crying over some expired MetroCards, forgotten in the back of my desk.

Packing Feels

I wish my record player wasn't already packed.  I could really use some good old scratched Jimi Hendrix, Dave Brubeck, The Doors or even The Muppets.  Judas Priest just isn't cutting it as a soundtrack to the milky-sweet haze of the past that surfaces when I dig into my Old Stuff.

I'm going through my closet and dresser drawers today-- a whole history of clothes.  My wedding dress, the one I jubilantly wore almost two summers ago in a field in Vermont, is now packed.  The shirt I was wearing while in labor with my (not-so) wee one is hanging over my shoulder while I decide its fate.  There are two (so far) garbage bags full of clothes I've outworn, outgrown, or never quite grew into.  

It feels as though I'm saying goodbye to all the Sarahs who inhabited each and every item of clothing I've touched today-- even those that are coming with me.  They'll be worn by a different Sarah by the time they get where they're going.

Today

Sculpture by Ivan Mestrovic

I am savoring these last few weeks of commuting to-and-fro the city. Bursting from the train tunnel towards the last few minutes of daylight over the meadowlands is a treat I'll miss. 

It's starting to feel like we're moving-for-real. I mean, I've been surrounded by packed boxes for weeks, and furniture has been disappearing or removed to the "staging area" every few days by my lovely wife. But something shifted this week, and I no longer feel entirely in that in-between state of waiting for this move to happen. 

Nine more days of work left!  Seven years'-worth of accounts payable has been filed (more years were tossed), and I've started emptying my office of what we were all led to believe in the movies fits in a lone file box. Ha!

I find myself wondering, "What's next? What does it look like? How does it feel, smell, taste, sound?" as the train whooosh-rushes me home-for-now. 

Cannot wait. 

Hello!

I ran across some amazing photos by Holly Wilmeth today. This one, in particular, grabbed my attention:

“Albino Boa Constrictor”
Portland, Oregon. June 2013
“Snakes symbolize transformation; shedding of the old and embracing of the new.”

Aside from its absolute gorgeousness, and the fact that I have a large snake tattooed on my back (a catalyst for my previous life transformation), this picture grabbed me because I am once again shedding the old and embracing the new.  But also the old.

I'm returning to my New England roots.  

In just a few weeks, my wife, daughter and I will begin the process of moving from our New Jersey home to beautiful Western Massachusetts.  I never thought I would be in this place.  I was quite convinced that living near and working in NYC was somewhat permanent.  But little by little, I've fallen out of love: with the overpopulation, noise, smells, train delays, pollution, and pace of life. 

Each day as I walk from my office in Midtown Manhattan to the train that brings me home to Jersey, I can increasingly feel people around me pulsing with their sorrows, anxieties, manias.  The mannequins in big-name storefronts scream at me to keep up my appearance by spending all my money.  Buses, taxis, delivery trucks, oversized SUVs thunder past me as I weave my way through the crowd, intently focused on my Penn Station destination.  

No more!

I will miss the things that I'll miss.  Friends and co-workers and architecture and art and books and food and music.  The thrill of walking down a city street in the autumn or spring, lost in my own world of music.  The sublime process of being tattooed by one of the best.  Feeling understood by misfits.

Overwhelmingly, though, I feel calm and sure about forging a new path in a place with more nature and fewer people.  Being closer to my family.  Finding a new way through the old.

Goodbye, New Jersey!