"maybe sparrow"

I woke up this morning many times, woke up this night many times, the time being spent on a Chinatown bus, forty dollars one way, carrying me from the outskirts of Nashville to lower Manhattan, a fifteen hour overnight ride which I slept intermittently on. But there was this one time when I woke up this morning when we had crossed the Pennsylvania state line and dawn was just starting to break. Most everyone else on the bus was still asleep and missed the sight, but slowly and slowly the sky started to fill with the grayest of light until orange started to seep in toward the center of it all, the earth, darkness, falling off the horizon, and the light getting a little brighter, eventually an orange ball of sun appearing on the far edge of the land, rising over farmland and the occasional barn. I was still miles and a couple of states away from home, perhaps further, perhaps my idea of home entirely wrong.

Niki talked to me when I got to what I thought was home, wanting to discuss the awkwardness of the past couple of weeks and what could be done about it. It again devolved into a similar conversation as the one that started the tenseness. She again told me I should move out. I told her that it wasn't her apartment to make that suggestion. She told me that it was her apartment, that she had got a lease and got it in her name. To her, it was a game of power, her ethics entirely different from mine, certainly from most people I know. I was pretty shocked by this ace she threw down, by the shadiness of it, having called the landlord after our last fight apparently and gotten a lease put in her name. The thing makes me so disgusted with her, though I was kind of before, but this scheming, her shady way of going about it, is entirely off-putting, and more than a bit disheartening from someone that is supposed to be your friend. She thinks she won something, but she has certainly lost me. At this point, after having decided this a couple times before over the course of our rocky friendship, I am done with her in my life.

This was all the more upsetting because I just spent several days in the woods of Tennessee with faeries, running around in silly outfits with friends, making out with cute boys in the woods, rolling around naked on a hill. It was such a beautiful time, one which I didn't want to end, and which I departed from earlier than most to come back to New York for my Spanish class tonight, a decision I am regretting even more now after this latest encounter with Niki. I met some really amazing people down there and thought about life in really magical ways. There were moments when I was incredibly stoned and laid in a garden watching butterflies frolic around me, thinking thoughts about beauty, purpose, and life, thoughts which I hope to soon replicate in some sensible form. I saw several shooting stars each night that I was there. The place and time was filled with magic.

I am thinking now about what to do, about where I should live, when I should move, whether it should be here in New York, some place more rural, or potentially some place foreign. Dreams of WWOOF and English teaching are in my head, were so before this, but now those dreams are taking on more prominence, as is the idea of a house, a dog, a yard. Niki is leaving the country for two weeks tomorrow and I am really excited about her absence, that it gives me time to think through things, these questions of habitation, as well as the thoughts and things I brought back with me from Tennessee to think through, those questions, always pertinent, now perhaps more so, of beauty, purpose, and life, and the relation among those things.