Goodbye

When I left Baltimore in 2006, I was devastated. I wanted it to work out; but I kept getting fired and couldn't pay my rent. UC really saved me. They were very kind and spoke frankly and honestly. I thought, ‘well if I can’t live in www.boltonhill.org and work near the harbor, then I will go to UC and get a Classics Phd.’ This is exactly how I used to think. 

I was there 11 months and had made no real friends. They were work friends and then I would get fired or quit and make new friends. Once I had no money I couldn't even do the things I loved to do: no ball games, drinking by the harbor, crab cakes every night for dinner, Lyric Opera House. And still, to date, I love it and miss it. I am still hoping and really expecting to get a teaching job in Baltimore. Randy Newman wrote, ‘Baltimore, ain’t it hard  to live… just to live’ and I can’t get the city out of my mind.

Packing, cleaning, loading my car today and I didn’t feel anything.  I wasn’t sad. I was so over it. I wasn’t even excited to be leaving because I don’t trust myself anywhere, anymore. I now imagine all places unknown to me to be just like Cincinnati. I imagine I have changed in such a way that all places will receive me just as Cincinnati had. My first place here was broken into. I and my cat had surgery for the first time in Cincinnati. I woefully discovered I have a violent allergy to soy in this city, etc, etc, etc. And I used to be the person who goes to a city because she read the book Crabcakes (James Alan McPherson is serious) and went to a really decent Tracy Chapman concert.

But I am hoping that that will change. I am only going to Bulgaria to come back to UC, finish a dissertation, earn a degree, get a job. I want to miss it and be nostalgic for my friends and Graeter’s coconut ice cream, and the massive stacks in the library, etc, etc, etc. By May 2012, I want to want to come back. I want the person who comes back to be 2006 me: A person who can get fired again and again and still feel like she could have anything she wanted, just because she wanted it.      

When my apartment was immaculate and all the stuff was packed, Skala came out of hiding and took one last look at the place. He was so sad; I envied his imagined regret and mournful consideration. But after I took this picture, I scooped him up, shoved his body in the bag, locked the door and never looked back.