further reading

The last time I saw Paris (an accidental essay)

new digs, new dos

Now see here.

in which our heroine

...moved elsewhere.

(Consider this my forwarding address.)

With all best wishes,
Gabby Fox*

state of the union

(sparing you the minutia of the MFA, which has consumed my life, my time, and most my words...)

I’m moving in with Jack.

At least until the summer. And then at least until the fall. (Who knows about next year.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it now: I almost cannot care about the endpoint. Every day I’m with him I’m a better woman.

And it’s not just him. I am two years shy of thirty, living in the only city in the continental United States with fangs. I have negative money—a dark and forking fault of debt just beneath my city walls. I’m still (fifteen months later) living out of what I salvaged from the wreckage of adult life: two bags of clothes, some books, a laptop and a massing stack of New Yorkers I’ll one day have time again to read. I have never been happier.

I’ve made uncertainty a way of life, performance poetry. I’m never sure how I will pay those mounting grad school bills, or where I’ll live. Or what I’ll eat. Or if my body will survive me.

But there is plenty that I do know (now with utmost certainty):

I am a writer. I can spend whole days just me and blinking cursor and admit to this out loud. When I read, I feel the ground beneath me. When I dance, I feel it leave. A humble meal made of courgettes and bendy carrots, cooked with someone who loves you, is finer than the finest five course menu in the world. You want the guy who pours the mueslix in the pasta water. I’m stronger than I thought I was. And mortal. I will go anywhere whenever asked, but I’m afraid to fly.

So, let me make these choices, Universe. They are the right ones. Protect me as I do.

Protect me as I trade the overpriced apartment with the elephants (and their subwoofer) upstairs for something rougher at the seams. The place that smells like fried chicken and has a tiny cockroach infestation (the cockroaches being tiny, not the infestation) for the place that smells like dusty books and frying chicken breasts (there lives four boys, and all of them philosophers). My home will be where Jack is: a carpeted, crumble-ceilinged den of books and papers scattered. Book tables holding empty cups of tea. Scattered tango shoes and underpants. Wooly jumpers on a thrift-store chair.

We spent a night apart last night (soon to be commodity). I asked if he was having doubts.

Quite the contrary, he said. I’m tidying some space for you. No second thoughts.

the twenty seven year old second start

And so it begins.

A year ago last week, I moved to Florida. I wore the amulet of Job around my neck, was visited by plagues of locusts first, then boils. I'd just seen my entire adult life thrown into cardboard boxes, fumigated, stored. I rolled one suitcase deep.

I made it a month before I flew back up the eastern seaboard—no money, no apartment, no job, no plan. Turns out, that was the best decision I have ever made. For four months I did little more than work a little, write a lot, and bend myself to mindful pretzels on the yoga mat. In December, I met Jack. He was there for every postmark of my application envelopes, there helping me make line edits at the eleventh hour. And then he stuck around. Cue the most magical winter of my life.

Then the discs went, and, really, that was hard. Still is. But, turns out, I meant more to him than dancing, and so I scarred my forearms making rhubarb pie.

He left in June. I'd been accepted then, been to the admittees' reception, and taken out the 100k in loans. I kept my pedals to the metal and spent one too many summer evenings watching Netflix television from my single bed.

I went to Europe. Got lost in France, then found in Ireland. Somewhere in between, I saw Berlin. I wrote the front fifty pages of a mystery. Went heather picking with the man I love, then had to leave him there.

I flew back into Newark, and cried the whole way home from culture shock. I had three weeks to group my ducks together for their onward march. A list of unfortunate things occurred, in rapid succession, then were solved. I got booted from my humble closet sublet and forced to find myself an actual room.

I sit there now, typing to the Internet. I have a desk, a proper bed, even a closet in which to store my things (they no longer hang above me from the ceiling rail). My Jack came back; I met him at the airport with a little paper sign.

And tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) I put my money where my mouth is. My first firstdayofschool since January 2002. I'm underqualified and thoroughly unorthodox, but here I come, Columbia, ready for that MFA.

Last week, under the rotunda, we were all convoked. I drank a plastic party cup of Chardonnay and mingled with the elbow-patched professors on the lawn. I purchased all twenty-four of this semester's books.

All that remains is waking up and getting on the train. I miss my mother—how she'd lay out all my clothes, then snap a picture of me trotting out the door. I was little then, and fatter, dwarfed slightly between bike helmet and clunky Buster Browns. I rode off on my banana seat like that about a dozen times, once for each new school.

The lunches, though, I packed myself.

hurricane irene: sunday afternoon.

Woke up to sirens and howling winds at five am. We never lost power, but everyone else did, and it sounded like the end of days. No tornadoes, no witches, no flying trees.

By noon, we've seen the worst of it. The city reels and recovers. New Yorkers, we are tough as nails.

We celebrate with cinnamon rolls.

hurricane irene: saturday evening

Four girls, two tiny dogs, tuna melts, TBS, and two bottles of Malbec.

It has started to wind and started to rain.