Everyone’s Your Friend…
As I mentioned recently on Twitter, Zac is moving to New York City.
Sometimes I wonder why I have a blog, when my entire online persona essentially lives and breathes on Twitter. Twitter is good for the poet in me who learned early, often, that words are to be used with purpose, like lasers. But then I remember that blogs are good for long-form rants and complicated states of being, and for quiet moments of not-so-critical importance, and also that not every word needs to have purpose. Sometimes words can just be words, small letters to the Internet to say hello, how are you, summer is coming, I wish you were here.
So. Zac is moving to me, instead of me moving to him as we had originally intended. He called me one Sunday a few weeks ago as I was leaving my house, late, to go to dinner, and said, “I just got a job offer in New York.”
“Wow,” I said back. “Wow. Okay. I need to sit down.”
Zac’s accepted a job as chief machinist of a distillery in Brooklyn. The owner has figured out a way to make delicious vodka. I like vodka, and this is good vodka; Zac brought a half bottle home and poured us each a tiny glass, and we toasted the entrepreneurial joy that comes of creating wholeheartedly good products and declaring intentions of scale. Zac will be building stills and a shop for the company. He will have coworkers and collaborative space.
Hello, serendipitous moment in time. Six months ago neither of us would have been ready to move. Six months from now I would already have abandoned the city. There has been a small mourning period for that future plan, for the idea of the space we were going to build together in Providence, probably in an apartment carved from a floor of an old house painted some whimsical color, down the street from an independent cafe selling iced coffee made with coffee ice cubes, and walking along the river on weekend nights watching the fires burn on the water. Providence is a good city, and I would have liked to live there. But the future is vast, and many things are possible.
Now we are apartment hunting. Zac came down this weekend and we saw places with a broker I found through an astronomical number of positive Yelp reviews. The brokers turn out to be a quiet, rambling man who loves the North Slope, a tall woman with frizzy hair and a big smile, and another woman whose family spends their summers in Boothbay Harbor. I like them. We saw three places and put in an application for the third. It had tin-stamped ceilings and was a block from Prospect Park. This afternoon I found out we didn’t get it, and supposedly they are calling us tomorrow with a replacement.
Everything is happening very quickly, all at once. Occasionally I wonder about the ability to make things happen quickly, all at once, something like a combination of grit, serenity, drive and fatalism. Something like leaving spaces open to fall in love with people, with apartments, with ideas. To love the self-employed artist’s lifestyle, the rustling of autumn in Providence, the potential Park Slope apartment with tin ceilings, all passionately, and to abandon them, serenely.
Well, damn. This makes the email I sent you a bit irrelevant, doesn’t it?
Congrats!
[...] August Zac and I are going to move in together. When Zac and I started dating, I wrote him a love letter that I never published, and never showed [...]