Where I'm Headed.

December 15th, 2010, was the last night I ever spent living in Morris, and I'm still surprised by how it felt nearly fatal; unreal, the same way death or giving birth probably will. 

I came home from saying goodbye to my favorite professor and my favorite Morris teenager. When I walked in the brittle front door of our house, I saw five people I knew and loved squashed between the wilted arms of our downstairs couch, watching something with loud, epic music. I hugged everyone goodbye, even though I would see them in the morning, and then I went upstairs to pack.

I didn't pack, though. Instead I laid in an odd, uncomfortable position on my bed, with my feet on the ground and a bottle of wine on the floor next to me. Then I sobbed giant heartrending babylike tears that rocked my body and reverberated through the floor below me. As I sobbed, I gave myself a strict leaving sermon. This was it: the last of it all. Now it was just me and the suitcases. No more Morris: no more spontaneous dance parties or horseback rides to Taco Jonh's or picnics out on the Mall...

That made me sob even harder, and soon everyone had no choice but to come up the stairs, their clog-shod feet thumping on the wooden slats, and sit on my bed and comfort me in a sort of well-meaning heap. My housemates and Alyssa and George - I don't remember exactly who came and hugged me and didn't say words, more just made comforting cooing noises, but maybe that's an indication of how much I needed it, that final warm kind dogpile validation of my tears and my presence in my small room above their heads.

After I protested my okayness and everyone went back downstairs, I started to pack but then couldn't. Instead I picked up the book Argie had given me, "Truth and Beauty". Despite the room that was waiting to be reassembled into boxes, I read until morning. 

"Truth and Beauty" is Ann Patchett's memoir of her friend Lucy Grealy, who was a poet but who became famous not for her poetry (who is, really?) but her memoir "Autobiography of a Face". Grealy had Ewing's sarcoma, and she lived with a jawbone that was constantly degenerating and being reconstructed via surgery. On occasion, she couldn't chew, close her mouth, or kiss; after surgeries, she'd have to walk the streets wrapped in massive bandages. Her appearance metamorphosed daily; she lived in hope of a cure, a final surgery that would solve it all, and she died at thirty-nine from a heroin overdose. 

Ann Patchett's memoir of their friendship has been called mercenary, cruel, an attempted cash-in on Grealy's greater fame. It might be all those things, but I read it that first time as a reflection of the way lives shape each other, of the way circumstances (a sarcoma) shape lives. I think that's why I read through the night; I sought assurance that I would shape Morris, that Morris would shape me, even when I was no longer there.

In "Truth and Beauty", Patchett conjectures that she and Grealy would never have become friends if they hadn't been the two students admitted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop from Sarah Lawrence. At first they were jealous of each other - admittance to Iowa was even then a selective business, and how odd was it to have two students from the same college be picked? Still, driven by the fact that finding housing was tricky and expensive, they decided to be roommates. After all, they wouldn't be competing, since Lucy wrote poetry and Ann, as the book begins, "drove off to Iowa to become a fiction writer."

The friendship was interesting and all, but mostly I was so awed - am still so awed - by that first sentence. It fastened me to the book: the fact that these two women, whatever their difficulties, had set out to do something and had done it; moreover, that the thing they'd accomplished had been the nebulous slippery task of becoming a writer, a real paid writer. And they'd set about it just like that, with a packed car and firm hands on the wheel.

That last night in my Morris bed, I saw myself as a girl being buffeted by things, being carried, too soon, from one to another, like a plastic thrift store bag on the swift Morris wind. I had been carried to Morris by my scholarship and I would be carried to Munich by Nader. It was just the way I was.

As it turns out, I wasn't. I'm about to do something that won't be very easy - something no American Beauty-esque plastic bag would ever do, a nosedive across the Atlantic Ocean.

A combination of circumstances - of my underemployment last summer and profusion of free time in which to write, of my discomfort in corporate German culture, and of my kind, constant boyfriend who encouraged me to try and apply and see what happened - have colluded with my own will and determination in filling out laborious handwritten applications to bring me, like Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy, to Iowa City next fall.

In brief: I'm off to be a fiction writer.

On July 26th, I'm leaving Munich. I'm flying home. I have a week in Minneapolis, then I'm packing my things into a car and I'm heading back to the Midwest to study at - I've got to say it - at the best writing program there is, the one that's turned out eighteen Pulitzer Prize winners. I can't believe it and it makes life feel even more like a beautiful dream than it does already, but there it is; and if my luck holds, Nader will be able to come join me there before Christmas. 

I'm not glad to be leaving Germany, which is a glorious place. I don't want to leave Nader. I have no idea what actually being at Iowa will be like. Still, this is something I have to do; the decision is mine, although fate will have to handle the rest. I hope that, whatever happens, I'll have friends who will rush upstairs and comfort me when I sob through thin walls, and who'll stick in my heart and make me act differently. 

I also hope never to have face cancer, but, you know, que cera cera.