we had a time, didn't we?

reading old diary entries, those penned before I had given much of a thought to ever posting personal sentiments in this wild west we call the internet, i am struck by all that has happened in the past 10 years. phrases like "y2k" bring me crashing back to 1999, before i had graduated high school, before morocco and falling in love and waving hands out car windows as i drove in my rusting honda from pennsylvania to wyoming. before ani difranco concerts and chocolate on trains to chicago and spilling secrets in long dark corridors with cold green tiles. how do you describe a decade? it was a melange of moments, of dirt streaked on cheeks, collapsing in fields after chasing geese in illinois, milkshakes and talk of those Big Ideas, some now laughable, in wisconsin - but then, how Big everything was then. it was Where In This World Do I Fit and often still is. this decade, well it was: the summer of saying goodbye; college and all that goes with it - the pretentiousness of academia and the genuine love of learning, the late nights writing about the Rwandan genocide and Marxist feminists and whatever is in between Dostoevsky and Frank O'Hara; falling in and out of love and in love again (and again. and again); my mother's cancer; too many deaths - my best friend, the girl with the beautiful red hair who will forever inspire me to never stop seeking and always drink lemonade on cliff tops and skydive in the czech republic and find my own way in subsaharan africa, and my uncle and my two grandmothers; my love for helene cixous and simone de beauvoir and a million other authors; all the hellos and goodbyes to so many friends who forever changed me with talks in the south of morocco, over indian food, in A Room of One's Own bookstore in Madison, on the floors of kitchens in Wyoming; getting married to my best friend; Morocco, a country i still ache for, a country i still pen love letters to(a country where rooftops were my home, where i wandered, drunk on red wine, through the medinas and spoke of LifeLifeLife in the back of a tiny shop while drinking mint tea always mint tea); the debacle of course that was george w. bush and the overwhelming relief of barack obama; Wyoming, where, while drinking coronas in dark bars and cross country skiing and hiking red cliffs and in the back of cars while listening to patty griffin near fremont lake, i met some of the most amazing people in my life; learning, time and again, what it means to seek out that elusive and unattainable truth as a journalist. It was friends and laughter and sobbing and teetering on the edge and finding myself over and over and warm oceans and freezing lakes and love and writing and.

as usual we're having ourselves one hell of a time

a classic. i will never tire of this song.

and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all

pumpkin cheesecake crumbs dot the kitchen counter, smeared gently onto a wooden tabletop bought somewhere off a connecticut highway. i easily brush these remnants of thanksgiving into the trash as i listened to a cd i haven't played for years (ani difranco - living in clip). it all plays out so seamlessly: i watch the lights of manhattan dot the horizon once again, we fall deeper into night, i sip tea and i marvel at how easily everything is given and everything is taken away. how long we take to build our stories and where those sentences eventually land. what becomes of our commas, our semi-colons, our ellipses. what will i remember of this night years and years from now? maybe nothing. and maybe that's alright.