plans

Today I went with my mom to Target and felt gloriously midwestern. I tried my hardest to dress Oberlinesque- see visable socks, clumsy shoes, big scarf, difficult patterns and mess hair. It was like my own little silent announcement to the town that I am in fact not from here, also a louder announcement to myself that this is a lie. Oh well.

Until things get put together, I am in a weird no-man's land of what is home and doesn't feel like it, and what feels like home and isn't. It may be that familiarity bores me- I feel like I'm in a time capsule of things and places that no longer apply as mine, but are just as much now as they ever were. I sit in the web of Ann Arbor cafes and inevitably see a summer spent at the same window tables, and behind them four, seven years of the same. I was so anxious to leave, but now it seems there's no question that I wouldn't really, that I'd always end up back. I'm one for absolutes, and so this quick and unexpected return feels silly and taunting. I'm exasperated by how happy my mother is. I was supposed to be gone. It must be, of course, possible to stay in one place and be different. Obviously I changed some between the fifth and twelfth grades. Then why does this all feel like such a regression?

There's a lot I can use these next four months for: actually reading Proust instead of pretending to have done so, getting a drivers license, making money, making a zine, learning the banjo, plus the actual school-mandated reason for leave. I don't want to go into that one. We'll leave it for when it comes.