Six or seven times now I've stepped up to the plate to write this specific entry, and not once have I been satisfied with the compound. It was always more heaviness and intensity than I care to expose. I'll try this again, my lite, reduced fat, sweetened condensed adaptation of the story.
It's been a tough 6, 8, however many months. Late last year, Povey came over and told me he had a job offer in Atlanta. I waited a moment for him to correct his clumsy mispronunciation of the city of Atlantic, Iowa. But he never did.
Weeks turned into months, a job offer turned into an accepted offer, and paradise turned into trouble in paradise. Every single moment of what felt like years, I was swallowed in a hurricane of questions. I'd asked them all before in my life, but this time I had to have answers. What do I do? What do I want? What do I know for sure? What is my purpose in life? What kind of woman do I want to be, and how can I make it happen? What do I want to do, and where do I want to do it? Where does this leave me? Or rather, where does it take me? From whom will I be forced to walk away?
Somewhere in there my fear evolved into anger, and though I was well-aware my anger was unreasonable, it was still there, waiting to pounce just below the surface. It wasn't fair to put it on him. It wasn't fair to put it on his new employer. It wasn't fair to put on any of my friends; they had nothing to do with it. So I put it on myself. I would cry myself to sleep, go to work and not talk about it, go home, repeat.
I can laugh (um, a little) now about how pissed off I was. I was mad at the entire state of Georgia. For a while I couldn't even say or hear the word Atlanta. I resented anything I saw that was peach-flavored. And if I saw an Atlanta team playing on TV, you bet I couldn't change the channel fast enough. Well, that would be true any time (sports, ick), but I hit that channel button extra hard!
After great loss of countless hours of sleep, buckets of tears, and a few fistfuls of hair, I still had to come to a choice. This has been the most confusing, heartbreaking, and painful decision I've ever had to make. But it's made.
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. I'm moving to Atlanta sometime in the fall. On the day I decided, it was cloudy outside, and I swear the minute I made up my mind, the sun came out. Things certainly didn't get easier after that, though. I've never had such high highs and low lows all at once.
This happened, and it was glorious.
It was tragic for me, too, because it meant the beginning of the end of life as he and I knew it here.
Outside of all this, the past few years have been "eventful". Real, character building stuff. Even though those events have all left me, and I have left them, I could stand to inhale in the space of a fresh new life. Of course a new life comes with its own set of obstacles, but those new challenges will entail learning how to thrive, rather than seeking shelter from yet another storm. I've been in the shelter too long now.
New chapter, new setting. Georgia, the road leads back to you.
