Gone

"I needed strength to change my mind, but those ghosts stick to me like glue."

Almost two months now. Can you believe that? Two months since I said awkward goodbyes to my family and took off into the wild blue yonder, bound for a new life. It's been a funny time. The first few weeks were a holiday, but once Jenn went back to work, reality set in and I realised that this California lark was probably going to be harder than it looked. Till I get a job, I'm dividing the days between gym and keyboard, chewing gum until my jaw hurts and creeping ever closer to a point where the cat gets punted out of a window. Anything repetitive is tiring, and how this makes me feel is like I'm falling from one period of preparation to another, never quite making it into the lives I'm preparing for.

Understand that sitting in the apartment all day gives me a lot of time to romanticise these things.

The more I think about it, the less I feel like putting down roots in SoCal. Jenn's been here too long to see it with anything other than jaded eyes, and Orange County is a little too hot and sterile for my tastes and my physiology. There's a reason why you don't see redheads out here. Jenn likes the idea of New York, of returning to England someday. I've never even seen New York, so it's as good a destination as any, a destination that leads me to thoughts of maybe doing a crappy job here for six months or a year, then taking a scenic route north. I want to see Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Illinois, and Michigan en route to New York city. I want to take a month or two to do it, sitting in the passenger seat with a notebook on my lap and then spending nights in all these nowhere motels. I want to be a tourist of the things you don't find in the guidebook.

Of course, all this is in the future. For now, it's the torture of beautiful weather and the lazy days of enforced unemployment.

Woe is me, readers, woe is me.