first day: rest of life

In a room with no windows and lots of bottled water, expensive art on the walls, they keep handing me papers and I keep signing my name at the bottom. Print. Signature. Date. Here's your copy. Repeat. I am thankful, truly I am--thankful enough to cry. Health insurance, retirement, pre-tax flexible spending account, massages every other Friday. Would you like insurance for your pet? Just sign here. This is a safety net, not handcuffs. Repeat this to yourself as your own name becomes unrecognizable to your eyes.

When it is time to break for lunch, I pick up my favorite black bag and leave the building without talking to anyone. I walk around the city and peer at the world from under edge of umbrella, wondering at the places I've lived and how they all look similar in the rain. It is cozy, familiar, private under there, and holding on to the handle for dear life, I start to feel like my own person again.

I put in a call to my dad's office to double-check my PPO plan choice and when a secretary asks who's calling I hear a foreign, troubling snippiness in my reply: His daughter in DC. Great. I've been here two days and already I'm losing my moorings. How can you navigate when you can't see the stars for all the city lights? When he calls back, he tells me that my choice are good, my reasoning sound. This is both pleasing and upsetting. Oh good. I can make it on my own in the world. Wait...I have to make it on my own?

When I left home on Sunday, the turgid, plummy bodies of my tomatoes were just turning red. The peppers were so green and small and perfect, the drops of rain sliding down the curve of their crispness, that I almost squealed with delight. Little Rat helped me load my possessions (more books than clothes) and said Don't you know that we're a family and you're not supposed to leave. That's okay. I can forget you if you don't care about us. This is an improvement. When I moved to San Diego, he threatened to run away and join the Navy.

I don't know how to say this because I don't know how to think about it, how to make sense of these pieces. I am smart. I have a brain and, what's more, I have school loans to pay. I like to solve problems, to take the variables and fit them into an equation of my own design and see the solution sweep away some of the chaos and disorder (if only temporarily, temporally). A job, no, a career, with health insurance, a trajectory, a purpose and a login and user ID. I see the point, the need. It's 27 June 2006, not 1906 or even 1946, I'm well aware. I wrote out the date at least 47 time today.

Even so. My ambition curves more toward the things that money can't buy. Even as the panicky, trapped feeling rises in my throat at the thought of committing a whole year there is an ache in my bones to set out roots of a different kind. The Hummingbird Management system might save your documents, but will they really last? When the hiring manager asked me my long-term goals, I didn't tell her about the little boys with freckles and their small, serious shoulders or the rows of strawberries that fall plunk plunk plunk into the tin pail.