Out (Part 1)

(I wrote this one month ago today)

I went for a walk last night. I had been grinding away on a manuscript for hours fueled by a four-shot of espresso and the general need to sort things out. The pieces of the puzzle are now shifting beyond my control. But I am able to see the shape they are making. I've seen it before. I know it. But that doesn't make it any easier.

It was exactly this time ten years ago that I left Atlanta. For most people moving from one place to another is part of a plan, but for me it was more of the universe prying my fingers away from a dead horse that I would have ridden forever. I had been too young to see the signs then, to feel the change vibrating beneath me. Rob had left for LA. Greg was in New York and I was still pissed that the business I wanted to build was going to be a one-man venture and not a three-person partnership. I had imprisoned myself in a place where I had no future.

My roommate (who was one of my closest homeboys) and I's relationship was strained beyond repair. I had been cut from a temp job because a scumbag white boy had turned the supervisor he was fucking against me. And I couldn't get a publisher to even read Dark to save my life.

There was a woman living in my hometown who was the voice of reason (even if it was for her own slefish purposes in the end). I left half of my things at the curb outside of the apartment my former homeboy and I were leaving behind. The rest went into my CRX. I left town in the middle of the night with so much shit in my car that I couldn't see out of the rear window. It was a miracle that the cops didn't pull me over during that ten hour excursion done under the blanket of night.

My plan was to go home, to a regular job, to the girl, to a life that had been simpler than the adventures and misadventures I had known in the New South. That was all I wanted. But of course, by the start of the new year I was in New York being shown a brave new world by friends old and new as I prepared to move forward into the second phase of my career as a scribe.

As that phase winds down to its final moments, there are all kinds of things that hindsight has taught me. I have always lived with one foot in my past and the other in the future. For me there was no difference between the two until I had to wait, or until I had to move on.

So as I'm walking last night, I'm thinking of the Modest Mouse song, "Little Motel", and of the kid who first mentioned the group to me back when I was working for my godmother four years ago. Minutes later I run smack dab into that same kid on the corner across the street from my crib just after midnight.

He looks like a man now. He's made the decisions that I knew he would. He's as happy to see me as I am him. It's the little guy at the crossroads again, reminding me of something that I tend to forget.

I know things now that I don't want to know, things that I shouldn't have to carry with me, things that remind me of all of the annoying subplots that have run through my thirtysomething history. But I still know what I know. I keep getting asked to forgive and understand without reciprocity. So often I end having to helplessly watch people shoot themselves in the chest and me in the foot when they thought it would be the other way around. But at least some good work came out of it.

I think getting out of this city is going to be even harder than it was getting in. I don't know when I'm leaving. But I know I'm on my way out.