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1.

Shadows have come back to my city again.

In the space of what seemed like about a day and a half, the stripped and battered twigs latticing the South Minneapolis sky threw the bird to the restraints of winter and seriously busted out the foliage. The whole lot of it is this lovely half-transparent radiant green, and I've been having a hard time even telling what kind of tree I'm standing in front of because it's almost too bright to look at. It's a shout in the street, and a loud one even at that; I knew I'd been missing it, and was braced for the inevitable adrenaline rush. What I hadn't known I'd missed, and which has also returned with all appropriate volume, is the shifting, shimmering playground of blacks and yellows underneath the leaves. The shadows have come back to my city, and the entire surface of the earth has finally, at goddamned last, got its texture back. The streets are three-dimensional again, halfpipe tunnels through and around a skyscape of canopy, having little in common with those open, sky-hammered wastes I've been traveling for these last months. Any route is a living network of localized warmths and coolnesses, mobile gradations of color, speckles of brightness playing across my skin. It's the difference between light that only knows work and light that has learned how to play. It's every difference in the world.

People brought up here tend to say that Northwestern winters are murderous; that these sunlit, crystalline, skin-rending ices are far more bearable than the ocean-born greyness that my homeland calls winter. And yes, I say, but how does all this brown not drive you crazy? How do you live with this empty space? Not many of them seem to think I have a point. But at any rate, we've orbited past that world of whites and browns and back into the greens and yellows and blacks.

And it's now, at the one point in Minneapolis' year that could unironically be called "perfect," that I've just about finished convincing myself to leave.

2.

I am leaving the Twin Cities and moving to Portland. Not immediately; probably in July. And I'm hitting Olympia first, so I can hang out with my family and rebuild some savings while searching for a job and apartment down south.

I've been trying to write this post (essay? letter?) for, um, a while. (One of these open windows is displaying a draft of it dating back to November. This version has been cooking and burbling for more than a week, off and on.) Part of why it took so long was putting all this into words, sure; it's all very fuzzy, and I have a hard time really explaining it. But it's also because I didn't really know quite what I was trying to explain. For the longest damn time, the only part I really knew was that I do not belong in the Twin Cities right now — that this is the wrong place for me to be. That this is not my home.

"This is the wrong place for me to be." Hell of a thing to have to face down. Because I've got a lot going for me here, right? I spent four years going to school in the Cities, and a whole bunch of my friends are still around. I have a job I don't hate, and just got health insurance back for the first time since April 2005. And underneath all that, Minneapolis a good place, with a strong cultural scene and a lot going on. It's a strong, living city, exactly the sort of place I should belong.

I love it here. I don't belong here. —Loop that a few hundred thousand times, and you've got a pretty convincing replica of the inside of my head during these last several months. The reasons to stay are so much easier to articulate than the reasons to leave, but at the end of the day, I still feel unfulfilled and antsy. Yes and no and no and yes and round again. I can't keep moving in the same track; something has to happen.

3.

So c'mon, Nick — you're supposed to know how to put these things into words by now, right? Do it. Name your one reason to leave.

The Twin Cities, right now, make me feel disconnected. Not truly Lonely — more like Lonely's little brother. I know that I'm not alone out here. I'm friends with awesome people who are very good for me. But I'm not a part of anything.

It seems like everyone I know here is part of some larger circle, some kind of community that supports, encourages, and comforts them, that both makes them feel at home and pushes them to be greater. I don't have that. Not here and now. I've been trying to make that kind of space for myself, but there's just not room; it seems like every friendship is its own separate peace, like I'm eternally out of the loop, like I can't learn to swim with the current. It wears me down, a bit.

When I was still trying to figure out what it was that I was feeling, I kept going back to the reasons I came out here. "Unfinished Business," I said then, whatever the hell that meant. (Maybe difficulty explaining why I'm going somewhere is a chronic thing for me.) Now, looking back, I'm wondering if I already felt that I didn't belong here. Maybe in the future when people ask me why I spent a year in Minneapolis, my answer will be, "Just to make sure."

This year wasn't a waste, I know that. Too much important stuff went on to call it a wash. But I've finally started to figure out how life fits together out here—where the networks are, which paths are clear enough to walk on—and I'm realizing that staying here is more of a gamble than leaving. The person I am right now can't fulfill this place's conditions for feeling rooted and strong, so my choice is between staying here and spinning in circles until I turn into someone who can, or going someplace where the me that actually exists can get to work at making a real home.

And is that place real? Fucked if I know. But these days, Portland sure feels like it. So tally ho.

0.

You may have heard this from me before, but I'm bad with endings. This one feels different, though. Maybe it's because this ending's been going on since the fall—hell, I could believe it's been going on since graduation—but I think I'm past the worst of the angst, and I'm starting to feel like a weight's been lifted off me. Or maybe I'm just getting a tiny bit better at this "life" thing. Either way, getting this properly written seems to be cleaning my soul out a bit.

(no subject)

And so ON this lovely Minneapolitan day--87° or something like that?--what did I do after finishing that post?

• Tooled around the bike paths near Cedar Lake for a few hours,
• had a few beers,
• and read some more of Ink.

Holy crow, I'd forgotten how bad I loved Vellum. Ink, of course, is more of the same, picking up where the last one left off, and it's just as much of a glorious catastrophe to read. Stories that constantly backtrack are easy enough to deal with, and I've handled stories that constantly sidetrack. The Book of All Hours, however, backtracks, forwardtracks, left-and-righttracks, uptracks, and downtracks. (Constantly.) It's a little disorienting.