Aside from one weekend of cooler weather, September was hot and muggy here. It would rain for a week straight and then if the sun peeked out, it would just heat up the wet pavement and the puddles in ditches; the hot, humid air would sit on you heavy and unmoving.

September is the month you think the weather is going to get nice, but it doesn’t.

September is the month you realize that summer–all that free time, that glorious time–is over and the school year is here to stay. September is the month you have to change out of the summer dresses and put on dress pants, and then come home sweaty and gross after a day of criss-crossing campus. September is the month you think you’re going to buy a pumpkin and start drinking apple cider and putting cinnamon-scented things around your house. (Because you grew up in Florida and believed that for everyone else fall began in September.) But you don’t open your windows for more than an afternoon, and there is no breeze.

Poor September, the month of high expectations.

In a lot of ways, my life is September right now–in between. In between grad school and whatever-it-was-I-thought-would-happen-after-grad-school-that-has-not-happened-yet. In June, anything is possible, and you might accomplish the impossible. In September, you’ve had your summer and you’ve done less with it than you thought you would. You’re not where you were, but you’re not where you want to be either. In between. Not summer and not fall. September.

I am not so sad to see September go. I am ready for October, which I have convinced myself will bring all the things I had hoped September would. I’m ready for crock pots of chili and corduroy jackets and down comforters.

Now if only life-seasons were as predictable as weather-ones were. I know I’ll get cooler weather. I just have to keep hoping everything else will eventually take care of itself.

In the meantime, I’ll be ready as soon as those pumpkins go on sale.

And I’m looking through pictures from San Francisco. I can feel that place on my skin still, I can feel the energy–like an electric current at the very edge of me–I can feel the exact rush of awe as I walked along a dirt path and turned a corner and suddenly saw the Golden Gate Bridge in front of me. The shock of red against the blue water and the brown hills.

The tea I’m drinking I bought there. Every night, I’d have a cup of it with organic honey I’d bought at the corner store. I’d sit in the apartment and listen to quiet music and I’d read or I’d write and then I would go to sleep.

I have come to realize that I want impossible things.

I want to live in San Francisco. And I want to live near all my friends. And I want to live near all my family.

And I cannot have what I want, no matter how fervently I want it.

Last night, Jesse and I watched an episode of This American Life. The episode was called “John Smith,” and it told the story of seven people all named John Smith. From birth to death.

The episode was brilliant. (You can read about it here.) There was life, in an hour, in seven people, in a baby named John Smith, in a dying man named John Smith. John Smith wins the science fair. John Smith watches his mother die.

I cried, and after it was over I just went to bed. Jesse and I tried to talk about it a bit, but the emotions it had dredged up were still a little too raw. When you’re a kid, you’re afraid that bad things might happen to you; when you’re an adult, you become aware that bad things will happen to you. It’s just timing. Life is elation and sorrow, and you don’t get to have one without the other. No one gets exempt from pain. My parents will, one day, die, and they will probably die before I do. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life dreading that moment, worrying about it, crying over it before it happens, but that appears to be what I’m going to do.

I don’t know how to deal with my parents’ aging.

So here is the predicament I find myself in, this wanting of the impossible. I want to always have my friends in the living room practicing for a wedding, and I want to have my parents over for dinner without their having to pack a suitcase, and I want to feel what I felt in San Francisco–that aliveness–and I don’t want that to mean I’m a seven-hour flight away from everything else I love. I want to write, and I want to drink tea, and I want to see Seattle, and I want to teach and teach and teach, and I want to preserve everything just like it is right now, and I want everything to change.

In San Francisco, I’d sometimes find myself with an urge to call my parents or Jesse, only to remember the time difference, the fact that they were already in bed. And even if I had nothing important to tell them, I would feel it like a punch. I couldn’t call. They were unreachable, they were very far away, they were asleep and I was not. So I’d drink my tea and listen to my music and sleep fitfully and call the next day and that was fine, and I was fine, but last night I watched a man named John Smith talk about how he used to call his mother every day on his way home from work, and now he finds himself still wanting to call, but then he realizes she’s dead and all he can do is put the phone down and keep driving.

Okay, then, this is life. Sometimes I wonder how any of us can stand it, this living.

But, we do. The John Smiths keep driving.

And maybe one day I’ll know how all this turns out, and I’ll find myself wanting other things, new things, or the same things, or maybe I’ll let go of the wanting and sit where I am, wherever I am, knowing that what I have is what I have, and where I am is where I am, and that is enough, because it has to be, because it is.

(You answered me, right?)

I mean, when I was a kid I once saw a man in a parking lot pushing a shopping cart full of ratty belongings, and I nearly burst into tears. The first time I came to San Francisco, I’m sure I didn’t go home with any change on me.

Well. Out here now, I’m a little, shall we say, different about it. For instance, while Jesse was out here, you could regularly overhear me hissing at him, “No eye contact!” I mean, I am serious about it. Put a cup in my face and ask for money, and I will not acknowledge you. I will not shake my head and apologize. I will not seem sympathetic. I will keep walking as if I had heard nothing, seen nothing.

Part of this stems from the knowledge that San Francisco, of all cities, has a host of social services, and a very small percentage of homeless people are panhandlers, and not all panhandlers are actually homeless.

But, it was a little shocking to me to see how quickly I could lose that little girl who once cried at the sight of anyone in pain.

Then, the other day I was on the train and we were stopped outside a pharmacy waiting during a shift change for the driver. I saw an older man in faded blue jeans and a blue plaid shirt struggling to stand up. He was gripping a cane in one hand, the wall with the other. I could not see his face, but from the back he reminded me of my grandfather.

He couldn’t get up. He struggled and struggled, and he couldn’t muster the strength to stand.

On the Science Channel the other night, a man with an Australian accent and floppy straight hair talked about the elements, how there are only ninety-two elements in the universe, and how we’re all made of the same things. I thought of this: that we are all, essentially, exactly the same, that we were all at one point rocks or dust or a thought somewhere, and now we’re here, and some of us ride trains and some of us struggle to stand, and there isn’t a single scientific difference between us, not a single quantifiable difference.

Why am I not the man at the wall?

And whose grandfather is he?

The train started up and we sped off and I was glad to be wearing sunglasses. And I thought about how many stories there are in the world, how many stories have come from a little over ninety elements, how many heartbreaks and deaths and illnesses and births and stillbirths and love stories.

I wanted to weep for the man, and I wanted to weep for myself, because I stayed on the train and kept going, and I said nothing and I did nothing and today I will do nothing and tomorrow I will do nothing. I will take my good luck or whatever it is and will keep buying chai lattes because I’m not sure what else to do. I want to help every old man stand up, but I can’t, and my apathy is only apparent to me in glimpses. Most of the time, I am able to keep myself sufficiently numb.

There isn’t going to be an answer here, just thoughts and questions. It seems sometime that we are all the same person in different forms, all the people on the train, and the man, and everyone sitting in the coffee shop while I type this. I still don’t acknowledge people who ask for money. I staunchly avoided looking at the drunk man on the F-line today who was shouting, emphatically, that his name was not Sharon. I once sat next to a woman on the train for several stops before even noticing that she was actually a man. I am caught up in my own world and find myself lodged there.

A mystery, how different we are and how very much the same.

I hope time and growth erodes my apathy, but we will have to see.

My last week here, I’ve been making sure to visit some of the neighborhoods I’ve never seen before. It’s amazing how much of the city the tourists never see. Those are always my favorite spots.

Chinatown? Thrilling, beautiful, wonderful–but insanely crowded, expensive, and overrun with tourists. Inner Richmond is the city’s second Chinatown, and you can wander a bunch of super-cheap shops and buy all the paper lanterns you want. The other day, I went there in the afternoon and it was foggy and gray and I meandered through a bookstore that was pure book-chaos: stacks upon stacks of books, delightfully cluttered shelves, creaking stairs leading to more rooms and alcoves of books, books, books. I bought a novel for $6 and an old map of San Francisco for $4.

No tourists + cheap prices + pork bun = awesome.

Oh, right–more pork buns. I bought one from a bakery and walked the streets chowing down, looking over stalls of fresh produce, wandering shop aisles of porcelain dishes, and peeking into fish shops that had huge tanks filled with swimming fish soon to become someone’s dinner. I passed restaurants with ducks hanging in the windows. People had just gotten off work, and shoppers were picking up things for dinner, and there was an energy to the place. An almost homey energy–the rhythms of real life.

Yesterday I wandered around Hayes Valley, stopping into insanely expensive furniture stores and art galleries. The neighborhood used to be a slum, but after the Loma Prieta earthquake took down a freeway that used to run near here, the place experienced a revitalization. Now, it’s a pretty place to window shop and dream.

After Hayes Valley, I rode a few buses, mostly just to ride them and look out the window. The MUNI buses are my tour buses.

I rode the buses through the fog and cold until I got hungry. Then, I found my train and headed back to my own neighborhood and stopped into a Chinese restaurant for some sweet and sour chicken and Thai tea. The food was hot and fresh and good, and it was comforting to be inside and warm, looking out on the foggy street, where people went about their lives, meeting friends for dinner, getting off work, shopping for birthday presents.

As I walked to my apartment, I passed a little martial arts studio where small children were dressed in white uniforms and parents watched and waited while their children kicked the air. If they saw me walking by, I thought, they would see nothing other than a girl walking home after dinner. I smiled and kept walking.

However, I still haven’t exactly figured out how to answer that question.

Why am I here?

First and foremost, to write. A large chunk of my novel is set here, and I need to smell the smells and see the sights and drink in the air that is San Francisco. Inspiration. Research. Call it what you will.

But I’m vaguely embarrassed at admitting I’m attempting a novel. I mean, who does that? (Okay, fine, a lot of people I know do that. But I’ve got a lot more confidence in them than I do myself.)

And then what do I tell all these people in two years when the novel has failed to find its place in the world and I’m onto yet another probably doomed project? Sigh. Well, I figure I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. (I love that saying. Probably a little too much.)

There are other reasons why I’m here. Ones that are harder to articulate. After a difficult first half of the year, I needed to be here. Or, I needed to not be there or there. I guess I picked the furthest spot I could from my normal life. Sometimes, I think, a little escapism is exactly what you need. And honestly it’s working. I’ve felt sanity returning from almost the first moment I set foot on the West Coast.

I needed to be away from the heat.

I needed to eat more organic food.

I needed to do yoga multiple times a week.

I needed to be in a place where I had no one to impress. I needed to be in a place where it didn’t matter who I was or how exactly I chose to express that.

I needed beauty. I needed energy. I needed eight hundred thousand people nearby.

I needed to discover Fado, a traditional Portuguese style of music with sad lyrics in a language I don’t know.

I needed space. I needed to think. I needed clarity.

I needed to know who I was out of my normal environment. I needed to know what was me and what was my place and what was other people and their expectations and how to tell the difference.

And I’m sure there are other reasons I haven’t yet discovered. They’ll come at their own time.

So this morning (afternoon back at home), I’ll listen to more Fado and I’ll drink chai tea and I’ll write and I’ll write and I’ll write and maybe the novel will be a failure, but I will say: At least it got me July.

It feels good to think of the year in this way, because I don’t have to wait for January for a fresh start. I’ll just have a little New Year’s celebration in July.

The first half of 2011? I got my hopes way up for something that didn’t happen. I had an emotionally difficult semester that taxed me to my limits. I felt very homesick. We hit a coyote on our way back from DC. My car broke down on the top of a bridge in rush-hour traffic. The day after that, Jesse’s car broke down. And within a month of that, our washing machine and our dishwasher both kicked the bucket (but not before spewing gallons of water all over our house). I ate a bad hot dog at the fair. I shelved a book project I’ve been working on for five years. I got mono.

I’m ready for a new year.

I’m ready for a new start.

So, I’m going to California, which seems a good setting for new starts. I have some questions to ask of myself. I want to be still. I want to sit looking at the Pacific Ocean, and I want to think about life. And then I want to laugh.

And if the second half of 2011 ends up looking like the first half anyway, I know the change will have happened regardless. If not the year, then me. I’ll be the one different.

Goodbye, first half of 2011. Hello, second half.

“Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of the incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.”

— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

I am devouring books like something depends on it.

I have not been to the beach yet.

My current obsession with the Beats has yielded the following observations: They were crazy. There was a time when people paid attention to poets. The 1950s were far more colorful than people my age realize. Also, we are far less controversial and society far less extreme than we say.

Just under my computer monitor sits a bumper sticker my father-in-law gave me for Christmas. On it is a picture of John Lennon and the words “Imagine Peace.” Some of my friends and many of my acquaintances, I have come to realize, would consider this controversial–or, more likely, just cute or sentimental or not serious. You can like John Lennon if you also denounce most of what he stood for. The books I read, they likely wouldn’t read. Or, they do, with the express purpose of dismantling them, proving them wrong. The discrepancy has always been there, I’ve always recognized it to a certain degree, but its presence weighs on me more than usual lately. This is not a criticism of my friends, or of me. But sometimes I have stuck in my head “One of these things is not like the other…”

I am hoping to travel this summer. I’ll give you details when I have some, when any tickets have been purchased or rooms rented, but I need to get away, and I need some time to think and read and write and consider things and answer some questions.

What a strange time this is, a period of transition–from something I haven’t yet named to something I can’t yet see.

I leave you with Big Bird, so that you can have the song in your head too:

(A note, though: are those bowls of rice? Should we be concerned that Big Bird is about to consume a lethal amount of rice?)

I was buying Dutch ovens and making tartlets. I had time to do those things. Less money, more time.

I was less than a month away from another trip to Congo. I was hoping for a trip to Spain within the year. Spain never happened. It was a nice idea, a nifty little trip that didn’t survive past the daydreaming stage. Several of the friends I had planned on going with I don’t really see anymore. I suppose this is how it goes.

Perhaps the equation was off. Perhaps it was never 27 that was supposed to be significant. Perhaps it will be 28. Or 30. Or 47. Or maybe one day I’ll stop expecting big things to happen and just get on with it. Just enjoy tartlets when you get the time to make them, and when you’re eating Ramen the second time in a week, well, try not to dwell on it.

I suppose what I’m really trying to say is that some days I’m scared that the most interesting things I’ll ever do, I’ve already done.

(This strikes me as a particularly middle-class, first-world problem, so I do profusely apologize, and I do recognize the irony.)

But, tartlets! Tartlets!

I can’t remember those particular neighbors’ names, but I have watched their little boy go from baby to toddler to child. His mother is pregnant again. Their yard always looks nice.

Since they moved in across the street, I wonder, what have they noticed of us?

They have not watched children go from crawling to walking. They may have seen our cats in the window. They do not know that Oliver is perpetually hungry and always looking for food to steal. They might laugh if they saw us hiding bread in the microwave. Or, they might think we were nuts.

They have likely noticed I work irregular hours. They do not know what I feel when I hear my students have lost loved ones, when I know they are ill, when I know they are struggling, when I see they feel unloved. Nor, I imagine, do my students.

My neighbors do not know this year has been one of my hardest, that I have questioned everything. Everything. That while driving I sometimes imagine not taking my exit—perhaps this time I’ll just keep driving, just keep going, until I hit the Pacific ocean.

But because I am no longer twenty-five, or twenty-six, or twenty-seven, dreaming becomes harder to maintain, and escape routes seem perpetually blocked. There is a mortgage. There are utility bills. There is a savings account that must be maintained.

And, so, I take the exit, every time.

I go to school. I teach my classes. I take the summer off to write. I am beginning to have my doubts.

I am shelving the book. If it will find a place in the world, it will be as a second or third book, when I’ve got some distance and perhaps some outside input.

This summer, I am starting a new one, something very different—I suppose in the hopes I will write something more marketable—and I cannot help but fear I’m wasting my time, wasting my life, chasing a dream that will never materialize.

Still, I keep chasing, because I don’t know what else to do. I do not have a hundred interests, a dozen possible paths, a range of possible career interests. I have writing, and I have teaching, and that’s it.

My neighbors, however, know none of this. What they must see is this: a young couple who are always behind on yard work, who drive aging sporty cars never washed often enough, who keep a big white upright piano in their garage that they will probably never restore. They see us coming and going, they see friends and guests coming and going. Perhaps from time to time they hear clips of music—Jesse on the piano, or strumming a guitar, or the sad songs I play while I’m writing, or something with a beat while I’m cleaning.

There is a bush in our backyard that we forgot to keep trimmed. It is now above the fence. I keep looking at it in dismay, but the solution does not seem readily apparent; because we have let it go so long, we’d need different tools than we currently own in order to be rid of it. And it’s a cycle—the longer I wait, the harder it becomes to cut down the bush. Surely, our neighbors have noticed that.

Sometimes, I become very afraid that we are exactly how we seem.

But now the sun is almost behind our house, and we are nearly blocking the light from hitting that tree. I am tired, but with summer comes hope—of change, of restoration. The doors that have been inching shut this past year have not closed completely, and maybe, just maybe, I will slip through one.