I realized last night while trying to fall asleep that my memories of North Carolina are already getting blurry around the edges. Of course I remember all the important things. But I was trying, for example, to drive in my mind from my house to I-40 West -- it sounds very silly but this kind of thing can sometimes help fight insomnia. (Mentally rearranging the furniture is another favorite of mine, and trying to think of five animals for each letter of the alphabet.) Of course I could picture it, in general terms: the turn onto Whitaker Mill, the Five Points intersection, the businesses and houses along Wade Avenue -- but there was a kind of static in my brain, and it was no longer perfectly clear, for example, which house followed another, exactly how they looked. So this is how it happens. I can still see clearly in my mind,like watching a movie unroll, my brief drive to work, the view from my (no longer my) desk at work -- but this will fade, too, as everything does. It's just as well. The brain isn't infinite, and I have lots of new things that I actually need to remember, but it's sad somehow too. It's a little over two months since I left North Carolina. Eight weeks. Is that all? I can think of my house without crying, sometimes. Brooklyn is starting to seem more real, and normal, though not entirely so.
But I have to concentrate on surviving here, not on looking back. I mainly think about work. And money. If I can survive the six-month probationary period -- but I can't think that way. I have to. What choice is there? Go back to North Carolina and beg for my job back? I don't feel like I am doing very well, but then I never do; my shortcomings always seem much more vivid than my successes. This city is so vast and unfeeling, a place that has seen everything; sometimes that is a comfort and sometimes it scares me. It seems that anything at all can happen here, and I don't simply mean terrorist attacks, though I mean that too.
Where is Robin? She sent a mass e-mail from an Internet cafe some time back and now silence, not that I am criticizing; she is probably insanely busy.
According to weather.com, Denver is cloudy and 63 degrees. The visibility is 10 miles, and the humidity is 40 percent. Brooklyn is one degree warmer, also with visibility of 10 miles, but our humidity is 59 percent. There is a pollen alert in Denver, but not here, probably because the people outnumber the trees.
Thinking about the weather in Denver, I feel closer to Robin. I miss her. I miss our lunches at the Cary Whole Foods, the sort of thing that seemed so ordinary at the time but doesn't anymore, because they were finite, and now they are over. It's funny to think there was a last one, but we didn't know it when it happened; they kind of all ran together, distinguised only by weather and what we ate and where we sat. Was the last one that unseasonably cold day, when we sat inside at the booth at the end and were constantly assaulted by blasts of cold air as people walked in the automated door? Or was it the one after the election, when Robin talked with all seriousness about their research into moving to Canada? I can't recall now.
It pains me sometimes, how much I forget. Perhaps I should start keeping a diary, or turn this blog over to actually recounting interesting things that happen to me, instead of this constant wallowing in half-remembered events and nostalgic longing. I weary of it.
