Friday Night in Mo-Town

I am drinking my second beer of the night, in my hotel room, listening to the sounds of the various humans occupying their little blocks of space beside me, below me, above me.  My friend and fellow law clerk keeps hinting via text that he’d love some company at the sports bar downtown, but I’m pretending not to get the hints.  I am exceedingly tired.  This week has worn through me.  He can manage being alone in a bar for a night.

This is a weird time for me, a time of upheaval, a kind of emotional time.  I don’t plan on getting too melodramatic about this – I picture my sanity as sitting cheerily in a life boat, floating easily on waters that are sometimes choppy, sometimes smooth.  I’m pretty buoyant, and this is all good.  But living here, alone, I drive from place to place, from work to home, from home to the grocery, and every turn in the road, every red light is heavy with potential.  This could be forever home, and it’s impossible to blithely drive down a city street past a lovely church and wonder if my child will be married in it one day, to ponder if this movie theater or that restaurant will be the site of Jack’s first high school job, Liam’s first date, to look with a critical eye at every insignificant speck, and not drag a little bit from the weight of it all.  I’m ready to settle.  This place, this lovely place, is as good as any.  I’ve lived so many places.  They are all the same.  Except New Orleans, of course, the most unique and infuriating and sublime of all my homes.  I could leave it.  I could not.  At this point, I only want stability.  Where we end up, of these two contenders, is a secondary consideration.  Primarily, I just want it settled.

This has been a good week for my ego – excellent feedback from the associates and partners, too much good food and fun conversation, a good mix of frustrating and rewarding assignments.  This week has been a bad week for my family, suffering (suffering) through the loss of a pregnancy I never even got the chance to announce here.  My niece or nephew, only ever now a strong little heartbeat for eight weeks, and then silence, never named, never known.  I will not be melodramatic about this either, but I’m not ashamed to tell you how I shut my office door and cried when the news came, and it was as much for my own loss of an already loved little one, as it was for her weeping mother’s.  And father’s.  My brother-in-law, wounded.  My sunny sister-in-law, broken-hearted.  The fifth pregnancy announced to me since this year began, and the fourth lost.  A brace of empty wombs.  God damn it.

I’m pondering a third beer – how often I do this, drink and write.  I have one left, and a bottle of wine but no corkscrew.  Another Stella, another few words, another few days of my life, and we go round and round and round in the circle game. . .

. . . the child moved ten times ’round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, “When you’re older”, must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town
And they tell him, “Take your time. It won’t be long now.
‘Til you drag your feet to slow the circles down”

And the seasons they go ’round and ’round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game