Wanderlust

Up early this Saturday morning. Coffee and a spoonful of peanut butter while I wait on some biscuits to brown. I’ve got the sprinkler running out back, trying to soak the beds and save the flowers from scorching even further. I don’t know how to fight for them in this relentless bastard heat.

I am feeling content at the moment — a delicious concoction inspired by the quiet before the total chaos of what is to come. I can still sit quietly and soothe myself with the tap of a keyboard, and the showers I take occur at a pace that stops way short of frantic. Lately I’ve been thinking about the life I had just a few short years ago and how it seems so foreign now. I miss the frenetic, drunk adventures, but I don’t miss being a total directionless wreck of a person, two drinks always down the hatch and prone to waking up filled with shame. I carry a lot of guilt with me over what kind of person I have been and should be, and it’s fueled in part by my embarrassment over my delayed adolescence. I spent all of high school and college trying to act so grown up that I acted a lot like a reckless child in my mid-twenties once I sloughed off some constraints. I should have gotten that out of my system a long time ago, but I’m a late bloomer in a lot of ways, I guess.

Eh, I don’t know why I’m dwelling on this stuff. It’s more or less inconsequential and here we are with a new game board laid out in front of us and a deck of fresh cards in our hands.

This tiny part of me is balled up, so excited about where my little family is going to go in the coming years. I love Memphis for all its quirks but I’m longing to give it a long kiss goodbye and to take to the road for a new adventure. I came here, knew no one, hated it, and then grew to love it and the people I met once I dug in and opened myself up to it. It’s been six and a half years, which is longer than anywhere else I’ve lived other than my parents’ house growing up. But when I walk outside into the soup that passes for air around here, I have to remind myself that there are places on this Earth that do not spend several months out of the year trying to fry your flesh and obliterate your ability to breathe. There are places on this Earth where you can look up and see an honest-to-God mountain on the horizon, or a seemingly endless sea flanked by sandy beaches. There are sweet, small towns populated not with Klan members but with live-and-let-live folks who don’t spend every waking hour worrying about what the gays are doing. These places are real and we can go there and start new adventures, build new stories, take new photographs, learn new contours of life.

It’s a little ways off, but it’s there in the distance. I can feel it. I hope that’s what I’m feeling, anyway. We’ll never have an easy time of it, I know. We are far too middle class and in far too much debt to ever coast freely. But we’ve got the freedom of possibility and that gives me such hope for what’s to come.

Last night we inched closer to settling on Mister Man’s name. Never would I have imagined going even this long without having a clear idea of what I wanted to call my first son, but that shit is hard, y’all. Name being destiny and all.