New Year, New Place, Same old Me

Like a new chapter of a story, our January started.

On the morning of January 1st, in the midst of mountains of snow from the blizzard, my brother, Wizard and his friend C started emptying out our Sunnyside apartment. One by one, my memories were taken down and out: the dreamcatcher hanging in the foyer because I didn't know it was a dreamcatcher until a friend told me, the kitchen shelf that caught a small fire when Monster stuck a plastic bowl inside and turned it on just before heading out with Wizard and which I discovered just before I went for a shower! It was trashed of course.

I had packed all the fridge magnets the night before and emptied it out. I hated staring at that white blank piece of thing: it had suddenly lost all personality.

In my mind, I held on to the thoughts of my friends and who will still be here when I make my way back. I hadn't even left Sunnyside yet, and was already dreaming of coming back in a year.

By 4 o'clock--5 hours off schedule, we were ready to strike the tarmac. My brother left with the uHaul first, C and his girl friend took my brother's van and Wizard, I and Monster led them into Albany.

Late into the night, the men worked to heave everything up into our third floor apartment. It will take even longer for me to put everything in its place not just for organization, but to also restore some of the character our knick knacks collected over the years tend to bring to our space.

I'm still working on it. I had to work on getting Monster to accept this space as her new home first though. Only recently does she not yell at me angrily when I say "we're going home" and drive her to this apartment. The first few days, she'd think we're going back to Sunnyside everytime we got into the car. It broke my heart and it took a lot of strenght to not break down into tears in the middle of I-87 South and just keep driving till I entered NYC.

Even now, whenever I am driving along this route, I have to fight the urge to miss all exits and just keep going South, south to my home.