Tractor shows, butt pain, emergency rooms, and puking Irish men: A Condensed Summary of August

Took a whirlwind trip to Iowa to drop off stuff at my new apartment and interview for a job- which I thought was at a community agency, but turned out to be at a couch inside a Remax Realty office.

Drove into DeKalb for a brief Pizza Pros reunion, and decided to stay an extra day because Lulu and I decided to look up the online DeKalb events calendar and do whatever was on it the next day.

So we spent the next afternoon at the Sycamore Steam Show and Threshing Bee. A tractor drove us from the cornfield parking lot to the cornfield tractor and engine display area, where signs advertised that it was Senior Citizen Day, and where a senior citizen band played "Take me out to the ball game" while other senior citizens sang along.

Lulu and I immediatly purchased T-shirts that said "Northern Illinois Steam Power Club" with pictures of engines on them. Then we asked a man in overalls and flannel (not that that distinguishes him from anyone else there) to take our picture in front of the largest engine. He tried and failed five times, each time pressing NEAR the button on Lulu's camera rather than on it, then handing it back to Lulu who would again demonstrate how to press the button. He said nothing the whole time, and by his fifth try we were laughing so hard we were crying, so we just thanked him and left to go check out the tractors.

That night we went to the other listed event, an outdoor concert in Sycamore, where it also appeared to be senior citizen day. (Lulu and I figured out that every week day must pretty much be senior citizen day, unless you're unemployed, like us). The old people formed a sort-of mosh pit in the grass, and when the singer sang "Love Train," an elderly man led a bunny-hop line through the audience, and everyone joined in.

I ended up staying in town many more days, because my tailbone spontaneously started producing the most extreme pain I have felt in my life, rendering me unable to sit upright. Eventually I went to the emergency room where they told me I had an abscess, and Lulu let me squeeze her hands and scream while they drained it. (I cannot thank Lulu enough for caring for me that week).

As I was still unable to sit for a few days, my mom had to pick me up from DeKalb. Vicodin was doing nothing for my pain, so I got a prescription for Hydrocodone, which I ultimately concluded was worse than the pain itself. Symptoms of the drug included: debilitating headaches and dizziness, vomiting, and peeing myself.

I had to fly to San Francisco a couple days later for my sister's wedding, and I had to sit on an inflatable donut pillow while doing so. (I opted for the inflatable donut because the box showed a younger woman sitting on it, unlike the box for the foam donut, which showed a 90-year-old man). Still, I wanted to die as I inflated my donut in front of everyone on the plane, and tried to discreetly place it under my ass.

My first few days in San Fran were spent assisting with wedding preparations. There was not much normal about this wedding, as there is not much normal about my sister. My tasks included sticking adhesive insults to heart-covered bubble blowers (such as "I usually see people like you passed out on tavern floors," and "You make me want to puke"), buying beakers, and Googling what to do when my sister spilled potassium iodide on her skin (while preparing the chemistry experiment that was performed at her wedding in place of lighting a unity candle).

Then there was the bachelorette party, which was a rich treasure-trove of writing material, but which I unfortunately must take to the grave with me because my mom and grandparents read this.

The wedding went off without a hitch (pun intended), though I'm still confused as to why my dad made us all wake up at 4am when we had nothing to do for the next twelve hours except kill time by eating many leisurely meals.

But the ceremony was beautiful, and I managed not to trip or faint, though I was literally about to kill the photographer when he insisted that the bridal party take those silly "jumping in the air" photos after we'd been standing in our heels for the whole ceremony plus an hour greeting people in the receiving line. This took several tries, of course, and I noticed that I was the only person NOT in the air in the final photograph he settled on. I was also scowling.

Then there was a miniature train ride through the redwood forest-- I'm still confused about where this miniature train appeared from, but I got on without question, assuming this was a miracle sent by God to relieve my sore feet.

Then there was dinner, and toasts, and during my toast I learned that the best way to get laughter from the audience is to use the phrase "vomit coat" whenever possible. Then there was dancing.

After the wedding, we gave a ride back to the city to the three drunkest Irish men at the party- the ones who missed the real shuttles home. I was stuck in the backseat of the van with a guy who kept repeatedly asking me what city and state we were in. Meanwhile, the guy in the middle of the van was puking all over himself, Noemi, and my parents' rented van.

Now I'm back in St. Louis, sending out resumes and cover letters that it feels as though I might as well be launching into outer space.

This weekend, I move to Iowa for good.

Good grief.

I finally figured it out today- the reason behind my panic this summer, and my crying spells, and my inability to do anything since I’ve been home except watch Glee: I’m grieving.

Dr. Elvis and others have insisted that I took my clients’ problems home with me, but I never felt like that was it. I think about my clients often, and I miss working with them, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t actually internalized their problems.

The other thing I blamed was culture shock. And this isn’t totally irrelevant: I was witnessing extreme poverty and bathing with insects and washing my clothes in mud and forcing down food I hated just to keep myself alive. But I actually found many of these things strangely charming, so they didn’t seem like enough to account for my moods.

So I’ve been thinking back to the beginning of summer. I broke down several times while cleaning out my apartment after my grad school graduation and would just sit in piles of my trash and feel overwhelmed.

Doug was helping me move out, and afterwards we were each going to drive our respective cars to his house in Indiana. “You can go on ahead, I’ll be on the road soon,” I told him, as I slowly checked empty closets and shelves that I had already checked a thousand times.

“I don’t think so,” Doug said. “If I leave you here alone, you’ll never actually leave.”

He was right. Eventually I had to admit that the only thing I had left to do was return my key. I paused on my way out the door and took one last look at our living room. It was still filled with all the decorations from our various parties—Lulu had asked me to leave them up, so that the empty apartment wouldn’t look so sad when she came home.

In one of many conversations I had with John that week about sadness and goodbyes, I remember telling him that I never wanted to stop feeling sad about leaving, because the sadness was what would keep me connected. So I was surprised and even felt a bit guilty about how quickly my sadness seemed to fade into a general numbness as I drove away from DeKalb that last time.

I spent the next few days at Doug’s house, feeling strange and like I didn’t really know how to be with him after having experienced so much without him. Which was unusual, because I’d always felt like he was so involved with my life in DeKalb. Though he couldn’t be there very much, we talked every day and I would describe everyone and everything to him in great detail. (He has a memory like a steel trap, so he would often reference or make very accurate jokes about people from my life that he had met only a couple times, or never).

But for as much as he knew, I realized then that there were huge pieces of it that he would never be able to really know, not with all the stories and descriptions in the world. And although that made me feel a bit disconnected, I also knew that I probably preferred it that way. There were things about the experience that I needed and wanted to keep sacred, just for me and the people who were there with me.

Sometime in those last couple weeks, Kevin and I drove to John’s apartment unannounced because we wanted to hang out. He wasn’t there so we drove to the gym, found his car, and made the quick decision to leave a rhyming note on his windshield directing him to the donut case at Schnucks. We then drove to Schnucks and discreetly placed another rhyming note in the donut case directing him to Starbucks. We then drove to Starbucks and left the next clue with the staff, which directed him to Brad’s apartment. Then we went to Brad’s apartment and left the final clue for him to find—but not before cutting it into puzzle pieces and burying it in popcorn.

Then we waited excitedly. But got increasingly depressed when we didn’t hear anything from John. Especially when we noticed that he had just updated something on Facebook. Pretty sure we fit the DSM criteria for clinical depression at that point.

But a few minutes later he sent each of us a rhyming text message, directing us to the Family Center, where he said I should go inside to solve a puzzle while Kevin waited outside. We bolted to my car. When we arrived I went inside alone to solve the puzzle and caught John in the middle of his act. So then John and I started scheming a new scavenger hunt for Kevin, which ended up getting ruined in a matter of minutes because we failed to properly plan our timing.

But it was a perfect night, and it somehow ended with all of us dancing on stage to music videos that we loaded onto the projector in Danielson auditorium. After that we went to Arby’s, and I remember looking at my friends and thinking maybe I shouldn’t see them again—maybe I should just let this night be our last DeKalb memory. (I stole this idea from Michael’s last episode of The Office, when he plans a last memory with each person and then leaves a day earlier than he said he would so that he can avoid the painful goodbyes).

But I did see them again. The three of us were sitting in John’s apartment on my last night in DeKalb. We’d been talking, and laughing, and then there was a long silence, and then we started doing what a core group of us would often start doing when we hung out—making sounds and beats with the objects around us to create a harmony. So that went on for a while, but then it stopped, because I had started crying because I couldn’t pretend any longer that this wasn’t ending. And then things got a little serious.

“There’s this side of me that comes out when I’m with you guys,” Kevin said. “And I don’t know what will happen to it when you leave. I think it will just go away.”

I started shaking my head. I wanted to say that maybe it’s not something that has to go away, that maybe it’s just something that was reawakened and that now you get to keep and take with you. But I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to put that into words, so instead I just shook my head and whispered “no.”

Though inside I think I was wondering the same thing. I wondered if a door in my life was closing. The door to the room where I get to do things like build forts and human pyramids and have dance parties and piñata parties and guard-the-egg parties and pillow fights and pranks and scavenger hunts and improv parties that require us to move the coffee table and other things that might break.

I don’t worry so much about myself changing. If someone suggests building a fort when I’m 50 years old, I’m pretty sure I will drop everything and start turning over furniture without question. But I wonder about other people. Will I find a friend in the future who will crawl under the table, lift it onto his back, and pretend to be a turtle? Will I find another friend who fakes bleeding from her stomach and then starts communicating with aliens in outer space? Does this end at a certain age? Can you do this with people you meet outside of school? I just don’t know yet.

John suggested that instead of saying goodbye that night, we should stage a fake fight so that he could throw us out of his apartment and we could leave angry instead of sad. So we made up a half-hearted fight, something about a gang rape, and he threw us out.

On my drive home that night, I started thinking about the thought I had had so many times over the course of the past year. The thought was this: I like grad school, but there’s no way I can continue at this pace much longer! But that night, driving home, I found myself asking myself, actually asking myself now that it was all over, if I really would be able to continue at that pace for a while longer, if it meant continuing to work at the Family Center with everyone and living near all my friends- assuming that the joy it brought me could stay the same.

And I realized that yes, I thought I actually could and willingly would, keep the pace of that crazy life if it meant getting to keep all the good stuff too.

But alas.

I have a lot in my life to look forward to. I actually, strangely, have everything I always wanted. (When I was 15 I wrote in my diary that I wanted to be a therapist, a writer, and to date a poet. Ten years later, all three have come true). I have a career that I’ve waited my whole life to begin, a manuscript that I’ve been writing ferociously and will soon be ready to send to agents, and a boyfriend who has supported me unwaveringly as I’ve followed my dreams- even though those dreams have taken me far away from him for the past two years.

But although the future is exciting, let’s face it, it’s also kind of terrifying. (Especially when you have a few weeks to kill between life stages, and you’re just sitting amidst your packed boxes at your parents’ house with nothing to do but watch Glee and reflect on how much you liked the past).

But I think I need this time to grieve, now that I’ve finally figured out that that’s what I’ve been doing. I always knew that leaving graduate school would be difficult for me, and honestly, I think that’s one of the reasons I chose to go to India when I did. (Silly me- a therapist who thought she could run away from her emotions!)

Anyway, I do feel lucky- lucky that I was happy enough to feel the loss this deeply. That's another thing John and I talked about- how grateful we are to be the kind of people who get to feel all the highs and lows of life, rather than the kind of people who can walk through a whole experience like this and not really notice.

And anyway, what have I really lost? Maybe I just need to grapple with the uncertainty of how, in the future, I will be able to incorporate all the many things I’ve gained.