I am kind of a jerk that way I realize. If you aren’t my friend on Facebook, you might not know I am actually alive. Nothing has happened, nor do I expect it to-though this is really not a way I am used to thinking about things. Living in NY almost killed me, as much as it lifted me up and shaped me. There you learn a certain kind of tolerance and patience for people with their diversity and different ideas, but you don’t have time to wait for people slowing you down.

Here in Denver it’s a little different, primarily because my days in NY were a lot more stimulating in terms of what I was doing, how many people I was talking to, and my line of vision was always filled with thousands of people passing through the trains and streets of NY with me, the students piling out of Columbia in sparse groups of two of three, and running down subway stairs to sit on the train for 45 minutes until I got home. Every day I woke up the same, I would wake and bake with K, run off to school or work, depending on the day. Sometimes I would skip out on school, rationalizing the cost of the classes and if I would pay someone that amount of money not to go, which is essentially why I dropped out of Columbia in the first place. I was working full time and going to school full time, and wanting to die full time, too, I was so tired. Don’t blame the marijuana, it was the only thing that would get us through the day sometimes. We would smoke our weed and have these mad dance parties, grooving on everything as we laughed our asses off, totally happy in the moment we were in. I was totally in love with New York before I started going to Columbia, and no, it isn’t because I went to school with a bunch of people who were from places that made it affordable, if not an easy expense.

It was a really fantastic education and the classes and curriculum were truly top notch, but the idea that you can live close to an hour away and travel 2 hours per day to home and back and sometimes another thirty minutes down to work was not a really great use of time. I was often out the door at 7:20, and would sometimes come back well after 9 pm. Then I would eat dinner, find a way to fake it through my reading, grab the main points, promise myself I’d definitely read it later (when I had more time, you know), but I was always tired. I was taking 2 blood pressure medicines and one heart regulator and eating dinner at 10 pm and barely consuming much more than a salad during the day. I constantly found myself in positions which didn’t allow me to afford the book expenses per semester, let alone food. Half the semesters I was there I actually did not have the money to buy the books before the class started, instead having to wait until far enough along in the program that I was often discouraged to ever think I could catch up, no matter how much I tried not to sleep or eat. And so I didn’t, and decided instead that paying the money to stop it then was okay at the time. It was a $20,000 semester I was walking away from but it was my mind I was trying to get back. Would I pay someone to walk away? Well, yes, essentially I was with no promise of any kind of completion. And so I left.

That’s when I moved to Pennsylvania and stayed with B and G. Great friends, and my gay husbands, basically B and I hung out and made everything from heads and headbands to music, painted lightboxes, and random photo shoots. We would end up smoking copious amounts of weed pretty much all day every day. I would be woken up to a whistle or a voice whispering my name each and every morning through the wall, my door opening far enough to reveal a hand and a joint dangling from his fingertips. I’d scramble my pants on, put my boots on and wrap myself in whatever coat was around, getting my dog to scramble up with me, so excited to finally be free. I survived on eggs and pickles and beer while eating ridiculous amounts of bacon and buffalo. We would climb up the hillside on the back of the farmhouse, some historic landmark on the underground railroad, me musing on the contents of the little stone houses. He’d tell me of the farm house’s history and I would be fascinated with the potential of ghosts, of course. I’d think of the history of the house, the fact that it had been there since the early 1800’s certainly didn’t hinder anything either.

After Asa died under the saddest of circumstances I decided to come to Colorado. I let last year around February 12th and returning March 29th to live here full-time. There is no amount of money you could pay me to live in NY again, but I’ll visit, if not infrequently.