We’re still waiting for more specific news about Jesse’s dad, and I am trying not to wish away any time right now. We’d like answers, but they are slow coming. So, we wait. It’s amazing how quickly you can adapt to news you never expected to receive. But I’ve only adapted so far to the waiting period, and that’s okay. A cancer diagnosis makes you think about time differently. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem to make sense to always be thinking about the future, to be wishing current stages of life would hurry up and finish already, because time is much more precious a thing post-diagnosis. Perhaps this has impacted the way I’ve seen the semester, the way I’m not fully ready for it to end.

There are still moments, though, of negativity. At the Christmas party at Jesse’s work, there was a time set aside for people to share “milestones” of the year. Most of the milestones were about babies being born. I just sat back, knowing this time wasn’t for us. We had no babies this year. We made no major changes. We had no breakthroughs. I’m not saying the year was a wash, or that there weren’t moments of brightness (July comes to mind, certainly), but when I think milestones of 2011, of course the first thing that comes to mind is cancer. It’s the dropped bomb. It demands attention. And it’s not something you stand up and talk about at a Christmas party. So, we shared nothing, and I felt the weight of why we were silent.

Even so, I think we are both in some ways enjoying the season more than usual. I think we are appreciating the “little things,” the cheesy movies and the decorating and the hot cocoa, even more than we would in a normal year. In the waiting phase, we can do this, because anything is possible, really. We are in suspension.

But there are worse things than waiting, and so we love what we have, while we still have it.

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.

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.

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.

Really?

I would like to say it’s flown by, but it hasn’t. The first almost-half of 2011 has been rough.

But it’s no longer winter.

And there’s the beach. Waiting for me to finish grading.

That first day, the first real beach trip, my toes in wet sand, the sun hot on my back, a big book and an iPod–that will be glorious.

If I can just make it through the next couple of weeks.

I’ve done something to my back, and it’s been bad since yesterday evening. I don’t know what I did—picked something up wrong, bent the wrong way, strained it with the Costco groceries. I’m not sure.

I have a bad back anyway, a souvenir from a car accident in Florida six years ago. Jesse and I had been married for six months that December, I was teaching at a charter school, and our friend Scott had come to spend the weekend with us. We were going to dinner. We stopped at a red light behind a Hummer, and a Dodge Ram didn’t stop, slamming into us and wedging the front of my car under the Hummer.

I saw it coming. I must have tensed. I said something just before it hit, and Jesse turned to look at me, and later his face swelled and bled from the air bag’s impact.

The rest of that school year was, shall we say, difficult. I was in constant pain, going to the chiropractor two or three times a week, getting MRIs and EEGs, all while working a job that demanded more of me mentally, emotionally, and physically than I thought I could give.

I remember one day walking the kids to their computer class and then going back to the classroom, putting my head on my desk, and crying because of the pain.

But, I made it. It’s been a long time since the pain was that bad. I still go to the chiropractor regularly. I’m careful of what I lift. Not as careful as Jesse would like me to be, of course. It embarrasses me to ask for help lifting something that other people have no problem with, especially since I technically can lift heavy things; I’ll just pay for it later. Carrying a literature anthology and stacks of essays wreaks havoc on me every semester.

I’ve gotten used to a certain level of constant pain. But right now, it feels like I’ve been kicked in the middle of my back by a horse. This pain is sharp and strong. It commands attention. When it’s bad like this for a sustained period of time, the self-pity wells up, and emotions are harder to process. My body is focused on itself, on its pain, and patience and perspective are not high on its priority list right now.

So, it’s rough. But, it’s been worse. It could be much worse. There are lessons, I’m sure, in pain, there is something to be gained. Recently, I’ve been reading about Buddhist monks. I think of transcendence. I think of the separation of body and soul. I think of Paul, with the “thorn in his flesh,” and I wonder what it was. I wonder how bad it hurt. I think of stories of redemption, of restoration. Pain eventually begets beauty, and maybe there is beauty in pain itself.

I will sit, then, in the pain. I will cry. A lot of the time, I will feel sorry for myself. But I will outlast it. I will wait it out. I will look it in the face and say: I will be here after you are gone.

Let me back up. In case you’ve joined us recently, let me explain. For the last couple years I’ve held a volunteer position at my church that gave me the nifty title of “advocate.” It also gave me a small group of women who themselves led groups of other women (the groups are called “small groups”—inventive, no?—at our church, but other churches call them life groups or community groups or house churches, or whatever, because we Christians love to name things you know; Adam started it).

Back to the pod. I had this group of women and for about a year I didn’t do anything more than what was expected of me. And I hated it. Well, hate is a strong word, but it wasn’t enough, and I knew it, and they knew it. I knew we could do something big, and we were just doing something small.

So in October of 2009, I rebooted the group, gave them a new vision, had a couple dinner parties to launch the new pod, and set off to change the world (or at least how small groups are done at our church).

I don’t know if I really accomplished that. I don’t know that I said everything I wanted to say, or that I developed my leaders as much as I wanted to. I don’t know if I made any lasting dent in the system itself.

But at least I can say I shook things up a bit.

What a blast I had, shaking things up.

Our group bonded fast and hard. We were different, and we made it known. Every month when we met at the church, I brought a big blue comforter and set it up under a giant fake “tree” at the entrance to the kids’ area. I lit a candle, spread out candies, or opened bags of cookies. We lounged and talked. We brought up problems and proposed solutions. We laughed at often-inappropriate jokes. We talked about things women only talk about when surrounded by other women.

I got to watch these women (along with others who joined later) grow in their confidence, in their clarity of vision, in their problem solving, in their creativity. I watched new groups spring up and take everyone by surprise. I cheered them on. I observed their groups and gave them written evaluations. I met with them to brainstorm solutions and to think up questions we hadn’t thought to ask yet. I tried to challenge them, inspire them. I believed in them, and I threw myself into supporting them and pushing them to aspire for more.

Every time one of the girls had a birthday, I brought her a tiara to wear, and we gave her presents and flowers, and the rest of us wore birthday hats and looked insane and goofy in front of a crowd of people (none of whom were wearing crowns or hats)—which worked like a charm to cement the bonds within the group and to create and foster a group identity. We were the loud ones, and I’m sure we were often annoying, but I was willing to have a loud, obnoxious, and potentially annoying group if it meant that said group was also intensely bonded and highly effective. Which I believe we were.

This went on for about a year. During the summer of last year, I was on fire, and I was imagining a future that never materialized. I wanted to make this more than a volunteer position, I wanted to be more involved, I wanted to help translate the changes I had been implementing in my own group to the system at large. I began taking notes, making lists, assembling a dream team I might call on to help execute my ideas and plans.

But none of that happened. I was on the job market, and I got the teaching gig at the university. Then, I started the job and quickly fell in love with it. Teaching began to eclipse the pod and pod-related activities. It demanded so much of me—emotionally, logistically. And it was easy to give in, because I loved it so much.

I knew something would eventually give. I was exhausted after teaching, and being an advocate was emotionally and physically taxing. More taxing, however, than the actual advocate work itself was the odd drain of being the different one. Everything I loved about the pod, its challenging of the status quo, its demand that others take notice, its questioning, all those attributes were also in and of themselves an emotional and mental drain on me, a drain I hadn’t noticed before I was simultaneously working in another emotionally draining field.

I began to make exit plans—plans, again, that would not be realized.

At the beginning of this month, I found out that the church is restructuring the way they do small groups to a regional model that I actually think is rather brilliant and could eventually revolutionize the way these groups look. Along with the restructuring came a shuffling of pods. Also to a regional model. All my girls are from different parts of town, so I would be getting a new pod. A new group that would need to bond, a new group identity to recognize and shape. I would be starting from the ground up.

Normally, this would energize me, but I knew I didn’t have it in me, not this time.

Sadly, I had to admit that my time was up. The exit plans had to be abandoned. Our last semester of work left undone. I submitted my resignation and knew it was the right decision, but in the week leading up to our last meeting I was quiet, melancholy. This was the end of a little era, a time of my life I enjoyed ardently, recklessly. This was months of work, of thinking, of imagining, of challenging and asking what if and why not. This was a group of women who loved one another, a group of women I loved deeply.

Our last meeting was Thursday, and I didn’t light a candle under the tree, but I did have chocolates on hand. And after our last meeting was over, I picked up my stuff and put it in my car and left, knowing it was the last time and also knowing that I had shed the last tears over it. It was time. It was time—these were the words that had made me cry when I said them to my “Pod People,” not because I hadn’t known the group would eventually end, but because I knew it had to, because I knew we had accomplished everything we needed to, and because all the things that went undone were not meant to be done, not by me anyway, and not yet.

The day before it happened, before the pod ended, Jesse ran across this quote by Lao Tzu: “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

It was time to let go. It’s time to see what’s next.

And so, the beginning of a new year, the ending of a good thing, but I am no longer sad. I am hopeful. I am excited. I am letting go.

I’d had a long week. It was Tuesday, and already I’d had a long week. The past few weeks have been good but draining. The past few months have been good, but draining. Some evenings I’m just plain worn out.

Tuesday, I was over it. And then I remembered that our small group leaders had asked if we would sign up this week to bring a meal to one of our friends who had just had a baby. I had planned to sign up for a weekend day, but I agreed to sign up for a night this week (how could I leave them without food? And how could I say in front of our whole small group that I would prefer a weekend, when clearly a weeknight was needed?).

I forgot for the whole day Tuesday and remembered that evening. Jesse was with me, and we discussed what we would bring. It became clear that a nice, home-cooked meal wasn’t going to be possible for that evening. We talked about bringing subs from Harris Teeter. I became increasingly grumpy at the prospect. How could we bring our friends subs from Harris Teeter?

Then I read the list of what other people were bringing. Everyone was bringing these great homemade dinners—homemade chicken pot pie (the person literally wrote that—so we would know she wasn’t bringing a frozen one, I suppose), curry, grilled cheese pie (whatever that is).

I typed our “Subs” into the box and watched as our entry popped up. Erin Bond: Subs.

Jesse couldn’t understand why I was upset. Our friends don’t care what food we bring. I know that. There was something about seeing it there, though, about seeing it in type. Erin Bond: Subs.

When you’re a woman, when you’re a woman who was raised by a woman who cooked everything at home, when you’re a woman who loves to cook elaborate meals herself and takes pleasure in providing food for her friends, who sees it as provision and nurturing and communication, when you’re a woman in the South whose friend has just had a baby (whom you’ve not seen because you didn’t go to the hospital during visiting hours)—when you’re that, you know you should be cooking the food. And you know what the other women will think as they read your entry, when they type “homemade chicken pot pie” (which is literally what your subs will be following). Because you’d probably think it too.

I wanted to cry. So I did. And then I took a bubble bath and cried some more. Jesse tried to show me the errors in my thinking, which were obvious, but it didn’t help me feel any better. Besides, it wasn’t the food, the subs, themselves—it was just one more thing I seemed to be failing at, one more friend I was letting down. Now that my schedule looks so different, there are many things I’ve neglected: friendships, yard work, cooking. I even paid the water bill late last month.

Well. The bubble bath didn’t help much, but a decent night’s sleep did somewhat. I had a hot mug of green tea first thing the next morning. Even though the weather was sleepy and dreary, I had a good day at school. (In fact, a group of Marine instructors visited my class to observe, and a former drill sergeant complimented my teaching, which pretty much made up for everything else because it was so cool.) We had leftovers for dinner, so I didn’t need to cook. The bills were all paid. I read Vonnegut, and took another bubble bath, and didn’t think about the subs. I’ll just keep walking forward, doing my best, and whoever is okay with my best, whoever sticks around, I’ll count as a true friend.

And I’ll try to swallow my pride and admit that I am that woman, the one who brings subs from Harris Teeter. And that will have to be just fine.