magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

So it was pretty anticlimactic. I guess that after nearly two years that's sort of to be expected. The whole process, aside from traveling, took maybe half an hour. I didn't look her square in the eye, I didn't want to make small talk, I didn't want to touch her. Although she hugged me, twice, coming and going, and her boyfriend, who I had met once before, when I was the boyfriend and he was the ex, felt the need to shake my hand. But I didn't say or ask any of the things that have been stewing in my head for the last 21 months, and I just got back in the car once it was packed up and drove off, and did cry a little bit on the drive back to my mom's, in between where the NPR signals were strong enough for things like Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me to distract me.

On Friday at dinner, Chris asked me if I thought this transaction was going to bring any closure, as Stef had hoped that it would for her. I told him I didn't think so. 'When do you think you'll have closure?' he asked me, and then answered his own question with something in the almost patented, super-overdramatic Chris voice, 'Never?' or maybe, 'When you get married?' or possibly something else.

'I think when I fall in love with someone new.' Which is a scary thought, as I've only really fallen in love twice. And the first time I was seventeen, and what the hell did I know? And the second time was with Stef.

I didn't feel any better once I got to Sharon, with the weight of all this stuff that I haven't owned for two years, most of which I don't really even want, a lot of which will forever remind me of a time with her, dragging me into a reflective place that I don't have a whole lot of interest in. It didn't help that I had no concrete plans of how or when to get it, and myself, back to the city. There was only room for one passenger in the van. I hadn't gotten in touch with George. I couldn't ask my mom to help me carry things up three flights of stairs. Sam's license is suspended. Aaron was at some work function. And so I just felt crushed beneath this, possibly in a way that Stef now feels liberated from it. And she does have someone new[ish]. And so maybe it is closure for her.

---

We ended up making room for another person in the van, and both my mom and Sam came along into the city this evening with me. And aside from the heart attack that I thought I was going to have from carrying all these boxes upstairs, being back in my apartment, back in New York, made me feel so much more centered. As if today was only a dream. That bubble outside of my normal every day reality that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't feel like I saw Stef today. It doesn't feel like I retrieved all of those things that I've done pretty damn well without. (The fact that they are all stacked in my studio, which I haven't been using to make art, or for much of anything else, to be dealt with who knows when, doesn't hurt in that impression.)

But I also still don't feel any sense of closure. Seeing her today was such an unreal blip that it didn't tie up any of the loose ends that have been trailing behind everything I do since she left me standing on the side of the road in Kent in the middle of December two years ago. Maybe when I start going through all of the boxes, integrating things into my new life in New York, or throwing things away, I'll start to tie up some of those ends. Maybe when we deal with the last few things that are still at her mom's house, or with anything of hers that might have gotten mixed up in my boxes, maybe then. Maybe that will be on my home turf, and maybe then I'll be able to say some of the things that I've been carrying around for so long. Maybe then I'll have some sense of it.

And maybe tomorrow I'll walk out of my house and fall in love. One can always dream.