I believe in bookends.  Beginnings and endings.  New starts.  Packing, cleaning, moving out.  

Maybe this is why there is something appealing to me in the life of an academic, a teacher.  Each new year is celebrated as it arrives, gleaming with possibility.  Works overwhelms, breaks are deep breathes, there is a sense of culmination as the winter breaks and days get longer and warmer and summer arrives with its relative freedom.  You can easily look back at the year past and have discrete markers of things accomplished, articles written, grades submitted, students supported, lectures given.  

I wrote a piece, trying desperately to be hopeful, when this year began, when I moved into my country home in Poughkeepsie where I would teach, and considered the challenge in front of me.  A split life between PK and NYC.  A broken relationship in the not too distant past.  A one year job, then moving on.  

Now I sit in the Harlem apartment that has been an occasional home for the past 12 months.  Lately, it has felt more like an expensive storage unit.

Now I sit amongst the cumulation of all my worldly possessions.  I just carried the things I had upstate back to NYC last week, piled on top of my already cluttered apartment.  

Late capitalism, #2013america.

We are the sum of our worldly possessions.  

Bookends, my most valuable things.  And also, gin.

I am 30 and have a PhD.  I've spent the last year commuting two hours to teach at a good liberal arts college.  It was probably the single most rewarding thing I have done yet with my young (?) life.  

Sitting in this rubble, in this ruin of things, I cannot help but make some lists.  Here are the two things I have the most of :

1. Books

2. Clothes

Here are a few things I have the least of:

1. Retirement funds

2. A car

3. A husband/wife/kids (do these count as possessions?)

4. Anything of real (monitory) value.

My life, in possessions, feels transient, fleeting, migratory.  My life, in possessions, feels like chalk on a board, waiting to be erased, wiped clean, for the next day's classes.

I don't know if I yet have the distance to look back upon this year with anything like thoughtful reflection.  I have been forced to talk a lot about this year already.  Everyone seems to want to know how it went, whether I crashed and burned, if I could see myself ending up long-term at a liberal arts college.  What, exactly, I am doing next.

I am pretty sure that this year was a good one.  Work was at times overwhelming, sure.  Students, at times, got me down.  Really down.  I didn't have as much time as I had hoped to do research.  

I did have enough time to read and write, both science and non-science stuff.  It turned out that the thing I was most worried about, the two hour commute on metro north, was pricey but worthwhile.  Two hours on a train is a little productivity bubble.  No internet, no email, no distractions.  Powerpoint, a book, a lesson plan.  I could nap for 20 minutes and still have a solid 90 to dig in to work.  

The train gave me ample time to think. This was a year marked by heartbreak and loss and renewal and hope.  This was the year, if we can consider it on the academic calendar, that I lost the first love that I ever really thought I could end up with, lost it suddenly and at the worst possible time, for me, when everything else in my life seemed in flux, when no decisions were made, when I needed a rock.  

The loss sent me reeling.  

From this loss sprung something new.  Something different.  Frankly, something crazy.  I have loved before, deeply and fully and in ways that required a lot of me.  Love is something I thought I knew.  I always considered myself incredibly lucky that my first real relationship, in and after college, was one of the real great loves of my life.  After Whitney, I knew what love should look like : giving and deep and without threats or power or disdain.  After Whitney, I knew that sex was better when you could look the person in the eye both during and after, when that sex came along side the incredibly unsexy business of loving some one when it wasn't easy.  

I thought I knew love.

Still reeling, I spend a few months making decisions I thought I could live with (I couldn't) and recovering.  When boys/girls were again on the horizon, I found my way to the most unlikely, it seemed, of men.  He was too pretty and I thought we didn't have much in common.  But he could make me laugh, and make me smile, and he fought for me, early on.  

From our first night in bed together, this man was different than any others.  

Before, in bed, because of my insomnia, I sought my own space.  I had a hard time sleeping with new people.  I had to gain some trust and affection first.  With FTD, sleep was immediate and profound.  I wanted to crawl into his arms, I wanted to crawl, seemingly, into his skin.  I needed him to pour himself around me, to feel enveloped by him.  

It's hard now to sleep without him.

This man was something else, something different, than anything I had felt before.  It terrorized me.  How, I wondered, could I ever give this up?  How, I wondered, could this feeling ever last?  What, I wondered, would happen if I lost this man?  Was it worth the risk, I wondered?  Wouldn't something simple, safe be better?  A safe love, a controllable love, something that I could recover from, if I lost it. 

At some point this year, I reached, and passed, the point of no return.

Not that I won't leave, if I have to.  The point of no return was simply when I thought it might be possible to have something like this for a long while, the longest of whiles, maybe even forever.  It might be dumb and it might be naive and maybe this type of affection, this physical longing, needing, this desire to crawl inside of him and to stay there, maybe this type of affection cannot last.  But maybe, just maybe it could.  Isn't it worth the risk, to try?  Isn't the possibility for failure, as painful as it is to consider, worth it for the possibility of his arms, his laugh, his spirit and his wit and his drive, all in my life, for good?

Isn't the possibility of a job I don't hate, one that fulfills as many sides of me as possible, one that is about not just science but education and justice and mentorship, isn't the possibility of that job worth the risk of failing, as so many do, when this system is stacked against us.  Isn't 30 too young (?) to give up that hope and to settle, in love and in work, for safety over the outside possibility of living a life that is something that seems almost too good to be possible.  This type of love, that type of work.  

So yes, I sit here in the ruins of my worldly possessions, boxes upon boxes, clothes being sorted, books boxed, here I sit considering the past and, inevitably, considering the future.  Hoping for a place where my things can live for more than a year, hoping for the beginnings of a real life, praying (even) for a shelf on which these books can live for years, decades, praying even as I place my winter coats and sweaters and scarves in a box.  Warmer weather approaches.  The future cannot be avoided.  

Here I come.