Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

4/5/2002

It’s really Spring now in Boston; full of rain and mud and sometimes it’s warm and then it’s not. I’m all introspective because the odd weather means I’m indoors too much. Plus, there's fog over the river. Fog over any river makes me brood, quote poetry, and want cigarettes.

Earlier this month, Tasha and April wanted Aral and I to sign with them on a lease for a house in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston on the other side of Simmons from us in Allston. People in Boston refer to this area as J. P.. Tasha said: “There are all these interesting social and political things going on in J. P… You’d love it!” By which she meant: “There are all these campy drag shows and hot lesbians out in J. P. – let’s move there!”

I’m a long time fan of campy drag shows, and Aral’s a long time fan of cute girls. But in the end, we passed on the house with Tasha and April because we still don’t know if we’re staying. That, and as I mentioned in the previous entry, if we’re staying, we don’t want to bother with moving our stuff up and down two flights of stairs. If we’re not leaving, we might as well keep our nice apartment in Allston. I think when Tasha and April do move out there though, I’ll enjoy having a good look around. All I know about J.P. is that Jonathan Richman lives there, along with my friend Anne from Countway. I mean that they both live in J.P., but they don’t know each other or anything.

It’s April now (I refer to the month, not the cool girl from upstate NY). This is the first April in four years I haven’t e-mailed Ryan with the first few stanzas of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. He and Dan were such engineers that I took to mailing them a poem a month to try to inject a little liberal arts into their computer-dominated minds. They generally liked the poetry, and of all the things I sent, The Wasteland was Ry’s favorite. I thought about sending it on this year to him; after all, we are still friends of a sort; but then I thought better of it. We’ve both moved on, I suppose, and it’s better to let the tradition die out.

Everyone I know in Boston is moving on, practically. I’ve lived here for almost two years, and most all the friends I’ve made are leaving or have all ready left. Erin and Mairi left last August, of course; now Jennifer tells me she’s off to DC in June, and Maria of course is westward bound to her boyfriend. Jennifer and I have made plans to hang out a couple of times before she goes, and I suppose I’ll see Maria once more. Once Jennifer goes, all my ties to Simmons will be officially broken. That’s just the normal cycle of things in grad school, I suppose; as soon as you get to know someone, they’re all ready gone.

All my friends, old and new, are scattered to the four winds. Dust went to a concert Thursday night by himself in Knoxville, and he’s moving up to West Virginia in the fall. Dinan and Ron tell me over the phone that they miss me. Kati and Michael are looking for a place to move and settle. They’re coming up here to visit Boston first, yay! My Grandfather calls me a lot lately; since he sold his Augusta houseboat, I think he’s lonely, even though he lives with his girlfriend on the southern coast of Georgia now. My aunt and uncle never fail to let me know how welcome I’d be in Atlanta. Underdown wrote me, her thoughts “swirling like blackberry jam” to tell me that Boston and I go together like PB&J, and that I had better not move. I can’t remember if my lease is up August 1 or August 31.

I moved out of the Simmons dorms almost one year ago. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in Ryan the first nine months I was here, would I have made more friends in my dorm? Would I have met another guy, someone who would still be here? Jill wrote over in her journal about curling up with the same boy every night, and it just about killed me. By this time last year, it was all ready over between Ryan and I, even though we hadn’t officially called it quits yet. The nights I spent over at his place had grown more infrequent, and when I did fall asleep there it was often alone, because Ryan had taken up running for a bit before he went to sleep. I couldn’t run with him; grad school wore me out in ways I couldn’t explain, and I messed up one of my knees in Murfreesboro years ago. Sometimes these things are so symbolic my English-major self want to choke on them.

And all of this is just leading me up to saying: I applied for a job at UGA in Atlanta and I think I want it more than anything in the world right now. Well, that or the job I applied for at Harvard that would make me almost double the money that UGA would pay. If I could stay here one more year and stash a bunch of cash, I could move to Atlanta and start nesting, getting ready to start my own family. Or, I could just move to Atlanta now and try to forget how much fun Boston is. Or I could stay.

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water