No maps for these territories

Just taking a minute out to make an observation, to share a bittersweet sensation…
I went looking for something in my old email account just now, one that is archived but I don’t use anymore. I was looking for a paper that I knew was sent to me last fall sometime, so I sorted and I searched

and what I came up with was emails from the period of time when I was just moving here, emails from my friends (and I was sorting by name and so these went from the beginning of school to the end).. so there were emails from the spring, from schoolwork, and then the summer, and then emails about visits to Davis, about hustle and bustle — then emails about my goodbye parties (and this is when I started to choke up) and then emails from my now-coworkers start slowly showing up in amongst everything else. Then a blank period when the spam has taken over, when I was too busy to check the account, and then nothing at all as I started forwarding the address.

It’s hard to convey how powerful this little thing was. I had the same email address in school for three, four years; it was the most consistent thing I had in some ways. But it’s not that; it’s the remembrance of the sensation of holding my breath and plunging in, of what it felt like to shut my eyes and do what needed to be done, to move, to do everything all at once it seemed like, to watch that happen.

And now I am here, and holding up, and sometimes I think I am lonelier here than I have ever been in my life. The loneliness I am feeling here, now, is something different from before; it’s the loneliness of a future that is cloudy and shows no imminent promise of change. Will I find a love, a partner, friends, someplace I actually want to be? Will it be here, or someplace else? I have no idea.