the hours have now taken on the quality of a slow motion daydream, while i try to take note of things to remember during this last week of the closest thing to freedom that i'll ever know again;

the life i have been making for the past five years whispers to a close, summer mania withdrawing in the face of a few more weeks of winter drizzle. never enough time for afternoons on the shore, slow walks down median lines, thumbing through paperbacks, feeling the strangeness of everything.

one last retreat to a house that i did some growing up in, feeling a skepticism with the idea of 'home' until waking up in the morning and feeling overwhelmed with a specific combination of old magazines, seldom-used furniture, and worn blankets - remembering, this is and was always mine;

some things can't be unremembered, like the precise muscle memory to back a car our of a driveway, or the way that the light looks through a particular window on a rainy day.

there is some sort of untouched innocence about this place that i have been privileged to know - this city, with its roundabouts, and its reverence and irreverence for certain things, with its dog parks and gourmet cupcake shops and courteous distance between bodies on buses. it seems good to remember that there are no cities that are fundamentally different from any other, when you really get down to it; there are always walled structures, and ceilings, and strong-arm robberies, and sunny days, and fire hydrants, and couples that take up the whole sidewalk when holding hands, and and and...

it's time to make my own way, to immerse myself in dusty heat and gluesticks, to feel as if the consequences of something belong irrevocably to me, to move things with my own two hands.

still, there are some things that i am hoping to do yet - driving in the desert at sundown while listening to talk radio, taking continental trains through in-between bits of real estate that normally are not worth noting, to make videos out of windows and to rediscover the joy of 36 exposures, to say hello to an ocean on another coast. there will be time, sooner or later, for this, and to work in the dirt, and for bike rides, and for feeling part of larger things.

there's time.