Be at peace tonight.

It’s 3:17pm.
I’ve done nothing today except reheat leftovers and look for information about the oil leak in Egypt.
It’s hot in the apartment.
Cat is laying on the floor in front of the fan.
The ankle thing has put a cramp in my style, but today I’m going to go for a walk. And take pictures of the things in my neighborhood that mean something to me. And I’m going to buy cherries from the Devon Market and I’m going to have a wonderful evening.
It’s going to be the perfect by yourself sort of day, the kind where you don’t clean and you don’t care.

I’m afraid to start packing because I’m not sure how it’s going to go. Mom wants Mike to fly out and then join me for the drive back. I’d be alright with that.

Preparing to leave Chicago is both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. While I’m about to embark on one of the greatest adventures of my life, I’m also leaving behind four years of friendships and experiences.
As I do during most great times of change and the turmoil that comes with that, I’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting. This week, it’s on my own actions and the actions of the people around me.
I was reading an article in The New York Times today that discussed the problem of not knowing what you cannot know. (I’ve been wondering a lot about this specific thing lately, so it was pleasant to find an article on it. It made me realize that perhaps my thought trajectories have a purpose or at the very least, some semblance of normality. Linked here.) I often wonder how much of my life has been spent fumbling around simply because I did not know that there were alternate opportunities. This has lately made me wonder if I might have flourished in marketing or business during my undergraduate career, where I spent four years floundering in confusion as to my future. I wonder now how much floundering I’ve yet to do, simply because I’m unaware.
However, at the moment, I’m resigned to my fate because I’ve got a plan that will take me to at least December. During that time, I do believe there will be a lot of soul-searching and a lot of re-designation of life’s particulars. I am going to take August to revel in myself, do some volunteering, and hopefully do some meager babysitting in an attempt to get some petty cash. And after that, I’ll come back in debt, homeless and jobless, but at least I’ll have had adventure and experience and a slightly thicker resume and I’ll be lacking all of the student loans that my peers have accrued throughout their collegiate experience.
I’m looking at the great Cape Town adventure as a semester abroad, something that nobody should be deprived of and something that will be life changing no matter what happens. (It’s also costing what the five week Rome study program would have cost, so for that, I’m wildly grateful. Rather than spend five weeks, I get to spend eight-plus and do something so much more worthwhile [hopefully].)

I’ve digressed, of course, but you knew that I would.

You’ll remember our friend Ian, unless of course you don’t. He was Hunter’s roommate during their junior and senior years of college. He had two suicide attempts during the time that I knew him, once while they lived on the South Side, the night that Emily and I left to drive back to St. Louis the summer of 2008 and then once again January 31st, 2009. Neither of them were particularly successful: once, he took some Adderall and then immediately told a bus driver what he’d done and the second time, he disappeared from a party to send veiled text messages and to wander the city by night. We were frightened both times, but the second was the last straw.
I’ll leave out things that happened in the interim, things that I would prefer to forget myself, but I’ll say that it wasn’t as though he was without any fault in the ultimate outcome.
My last words to him were, “I love you,” at five o’clock the next morning, when he came back to the apartment on Magnolia to collect his things. He left through the back door, down those gray steps. There had been tears and shouting that night, anger and hurt feelings shared by us all.
And he was gone.
We went out to breakfast that morning. Me, Emily, Hunter, Coupe and Kyle. We gave thanks for our strong friendships, for the love that we shared together.  After that, we didn’t hear from Ian and we made no attempt to contact him either. He settled things with Kyle and Hunter and Coupe, figuring out the bills, etc. We made cruel jokes, said hurtful things, and shut him out. The butt of all the jokes was Ian. At the time, it seemed like the sensible thing to do: band together and knit back together our hurt feelings.

Time passed.

I often wonder what he’s doing with his life. I don’t really care to know, as some of the things that happened between us don’t deserve an answer, but now I wonder if we should have handled it differently.

I never foresaw the outcome of the breakup before I did it. I sometimes wonder if I should have stayed in the relationship just to avoid the aftermath, but then I realize that there was no option to do that. The reaction to the breakup confirmed everything I was thinking and solidified the fact that what I had done was right. (The manner of the final break up may not have been the most tactful, of course, but there was a complicating situation that had arisen in the meantime that necessitated an immediate and complete break up.)
After, I realized firsthand what the group mentality can do. I’ve lost more friends than I can count simply because of that group ideal of banding together. Because I’d hurt him, that I’d disrupted the flow of normalcy, I was no longer welcome. There were incidents, of course, and there was the final end. People who I counted among my confidants, among my very best friends, no longer speak to me. They pretend that I’ve committed some unspeakable act against them, that I’m despicable. They joined in calling me disgusting names behind my back, spreading lies and betraying confidences.
Running into mutual friends who’ve “de-friended” me on Facebook is always a sick pleasure for me. I love being polite and nice, and I love to see their reactions. I’m not the evil person I’ve been made out to be. But to them, I am. I hurt one of their own and have suffered the consequences. And while I’m not particularly hurt by it as I was never truly one of their company, I am more hurt than I thought I would be.
The immaturity and lack of respect shown by these individuals toward me makes me think about how I acted when I was a part of that group. And it makes me think about the Ian situation.
What could we have done differently?
What should we have done differently?
Were our actions correct?
Probably not, but at the time, we were unaware of different avenues of expression of our grief and dismay.
I feel badly, and while I’m not sure exactly what I would have done differently, I do know that we handled the situation immaturely and disrespectfully. Perhaps we were right to cut him out of our lives based on the stresses we were facing as a direct result of his actions, but we were not in any way correct to say some of the things that we did. We were in no way right to make the generalizations that we made.
And so, I am apologizing. None of us were right. Not you, not me, not us, not them. But we could have acted differently. And we should have.

Next time I’m faced with a situation that involves the termination of a friendship or some other severe conflict, hopefully I will be able to step back and take a look at the situation before I act in a way that I may someday regret. At the very least, that might present a positive outcome from an otherwise miserable situation.

Bruise watch: Day 7: Purples, yellows, hints of green. It’s not so much the bruise that’s worrying me at the moment but it’s the fact that I’m still in pain when I walk on it. But there’s no way I’m about to go to the Wellness Center for it, so it’s going to have to wait until I get back to Colorado.

I met Wade Williams at Dairy Queen. It was many years ago. We became friends after I called the number he wrote on a receipt.  His friends had dared him to do it. And so he had.
We’ve been friends for years. I haven’t seen him since high school.
Wow, has it really been that long? We talk here and there.
We are the two most opposite people on the planet. He went to Colorado Christian University. Granted I did go a Catholic high school and a Catholic college, but we are religious people on very different planes. I’m spiritual (and consider myself to be in that typical post-adolescent transient philosophical stage) and he is religious. Deeply so. In ways I’ll never comprehend.
But tonight, he paid me a high compliment.
It made my night and reinforced to me that friends come in all forms.

Wade

The last time I went to sleep was for an hour, this morning. Before that, it was Sunday night.

Somehow trivia stretched into a visit to Mullens, our favorite Wrigleyville bar, which stretched into darts and then I met some Irish (Madeline was like, “It does not surprise me at all that you just came back in and said, ‘I met some Irish, let’s go.'”), which stretched into a joining of groups and then the late night bars. By then, it was past four, and the sunrise was calling to us. We climbed the lighthouse, pulling out fencing to crawl under before attempting to scale the ladder leading to the top. We were unsuccessful, and so we waited patiently, dangling our feet over the edge as though we could touch the water. We couldn’t.
The sunrise never came, but the light did.
And so we drove to Midway.
And then I came home. And then closed my eyes. And then I opened them, dashing off to babysit in the suburbs. It was a long day.
I dared not sleep while the kids were napping, for fear I’d fall into a deep, necessary sleep. And so I watched “Twilight,” that teenaged vampire movie.
And then I took the wrong highway because I was nearly a zombie at that point. Two hours later, I arrived home.
Only to leave again to do more trivia.
Third place tonight.
The trivia announcer tells me he always enjoys our wrong answers. They’re always hilarious, he tells me. I smile.

The thirteen pounds of furry black animal has been renamed Carlos. I love him. I’ve been making my absences up to him with Fancy Feast (which is fancier than you’d think), and so he’s got this roundness about him that I find entirely too endearing. He’s in love with plastic bags. Not to eat, but to sit on. Currently, he’s lounging on a Target bag.
He went for his first car ride the other day without his carrier. He hates getting in; I’m assuming he thinks we’re going to the vet, because that’s where we’re always going and they hurt him so much every time. But once he was in, he laid calmly and napped. Until I got out and then he gave me these fearful yellow eyes and I kissed the glass and told him he’d live.
Not surprisingly, he did.

The swelling on my ankle is not going down. I am in considerable pain, but not enough to hinder mobility (sort of…) This injury is the result of a soccer game with friends and then a bunch of Chicagoans in the park on Saturday. A kid wearing glittering cleats (thus his new name, Glitter Cleats) kicked me, right before being yelled at to take it easy on the girl. That upset me, obviously, and it didn’t bother me until I looked down and saw the emerging mass that had become my ankle.
That night Maddie, Patrick and I joined Harrison for a comedy show downtown and then went to a bbq being held by one of his friends. I seriously enjoy conversation. It was odd; I knew no one there, but I decided to make the best of it. It was enjoyable.

I’m rambling.
I’m going to start posting my pros/cons lists for Chicago/Denver.
Chicago Pro: Humidity makes my hair curl gorgeously.
Con: Humidity makes all of my cereal stale.