Dispatches from the Midwest, Issue 5

Tuesday, 4 March 2014: Morning

I’m up early, for once, as I’m leaving Bloomington today. While I wait for Duncle to finish getting ready, I spend a few quiet moments sitting in his armchair, gazing out at the late winter morning, just taking the chance to relish the white-gold morning sunlight shining through the trees.

It’s exquisitely beautiful, and I hate to leave it, and so to comfort myself, I try to remind myself that if I lived here, I would take all of  this for granted.

I know this, because I did, after all.

Before I make tracks for central Indiana, I spend a few hours with Michael, poking around bookstores and the Game Preserve and Pygmalions and the “Christian coffee shop” and debate the nature of corruption in politics and the concept of privacy in post 9/11 society. We grab lunch at Yats (oh chili cheese crawfish etoufee, I miss you so!) and swing by Tracks so I can get one last good-bye from Duncle. And then I drop off Michael, and it’s time for Optimus Prime and me to leave town.

It’s impossible not to cry a little as I start the drive north on the 37. Each time I leave Bloomington, I’m a little older, and the memories are a little more faded—yet still, no less beloved and important. I think of Michael and Anna, and Duncle and Jo, and so many friends that will never be together again, and my heart twists and I cry a little more. And then, into my brain pops a quote that I saw on one of Anna’s books: “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

And then, fittingly, the best part of the day, and perhaps the trip, happens next. The Snow Patrol song “Run” starts playing on the car stereo, and I smile a little wryly when the song gets to the lyric “You’ve been the only thing that’s right, in all I’ve done…” Right after Michael and I broke up, I used to quote that line to myself, because it felt like that, that loving Michael and being with him was the one decent, beautiful, and right thing I had done in an otherwise unremarkable life. But I smile now, because I know that’s no longer true—if it ever even was. There’s been plenty that I’ve done right by this point in my life, and that’s something that I can hold onto for comfort as I leave Bloomington behind, once again.