Moving On

Place is moving on. It is a phrasel verb. It is in motion. By definition it means to go on to a different place, subject, activity. Moving on can also mean to put a difficult experience behind and progress emotionally and mentally, such as moving on from a Perfect Storm and moving on from Lost.

Moving on is in motion and I am on the move.

Place is with my therapist whose name begins with the eleventh letter in the alphabet. She came to see me at my apartment in February before moving to Idaho. She will be retiring on September 30, 2022. As she drove away after our last in person session, two years after the start of the pandemic, I stood at the end of the sidewalk and watched her car take a right and drive away down Western Avenue. I watched until I couldn’t see her car anymore. When I won’t see a place or person again I must watch them/it for as long as can. I look at them from all angles- from my right side then my left then straight ahead for the full view. I must feel the weight of their image against my eyes as if someone were pushing their hands against glass. I hugged her goodbye twice. I hugged her once then I hugged her again as if I forgot something, like I forgot how she felt. We have been together since shortly after my first manic episode when I was twenty- six. I am fifty now going on fifty-one and we have been together twenty six years, nearly half my life. She was with me as I first moved into wellness and she has seen me move into it again. She is with me as I am moving out of lost but it will be with someone new when I am found. I am no longer depressed, I am writing again (as this is way over a thousand words). I want her to see me open our bed and breakfast, publish my first book- to move into the me we have been waiting for so long. She says I can text her from time to time,. She says when my first novel is published, the one I will be rewriting soon, the one she read after graduate school, it will be open on  her lap. I will send her a picture of me and my husband in front of the B and B I am working hard for us to have. I imagine it will be in another state with a front yard full of flowers my husband is learning about to plant. The house will be Victorian style, maybe a light blue or yellow, with a porch large enough to fit a rocking chair and a rafter for spiders to hang. I will want to kill them but my husband will tell me not to. Moving on here is defined as going on to a different place.

Moving on is seeing a new person whose name begins with the tenth letter of the alphabet, the letter right before who I am seeing now. I think this is serendipitous.

.           Moving on tastes bad, like a dill pickle, and its letters are heavy and bloated, they sink below the line in which they are written. I look up quotes about moving on but they read like a self help book; they are phrases my mother sometimes gives and I reject, they force me to hang up the phone. When I look up meanings they reconfigure into breaking up or leaving or divorce and the more searching I do the more scared I become.

Place has moved to my parent’s condo. Place often moves to wherever they are. I have a key to their building and I enter their condo like I have been living there, too. My dad will be at the counter in a sweatshirt. This day I come over it is the color of lake Michigan in summer. Since the pandemic and his surgeries he has acquired a rainbow of sweatshirts. His belt is almost lilac but probably closer to periwinkle. It is pulled tight. Since his surgery I don’t think he has bought new jeans and although it has been a while since he has had to tighten his belt he looks really small. My mother is talking through his words to me- saying hello, have I seen the bathroom, they have put in the floor. They are remodeling the bathroom, making the shower more accessible, the toilet seat higher so they can sit down easily, something with the word down. They have put in a bidet! When my dad tells me this he laughs and I can see he is not wearing his teeth.

My dad and I are baking together. This day we are making brioche. I am learning to bake for the bed and breakfast. When we bake he sets out all the ingredients in bowls or measuring cups, he shows me how he cleans right after we use a utensil, how to use a pastry bag, how to properly measure flour or why we use baking powder instead of baking soda. He tells me things, too, like what he baked first when he was going to the French cooking school at Dumas Pere. He would have loved to have been a chef. For a while he sold his cheesecakes to a restaurant, the only cheesecake I will eat. It has a dark chocolate cookie crust and the cake is as white as a new bride’s wedding dress.

Right after his surgery he told us he wanted to die. This was one thing we had had in common.

My dad likes to help me when he can. I don’t actually know if he likes it but he does it. I don’t always ask for it. The last time he helped me I thought I had lost my car because Triple A couldn’t remember where they moved it after retrieving it from a gas station where it had broken down. There was a thunderstorm and the woman at Triple A said it would be at least five hours until the driver would arrive. I left my car at pump number one and told the attendant it would be being picked up, I wasn’t abandoning my car. I don’t think the man understood me but he nodded his head from behind the glass. I called every hour to see if they had picked up my car. At midnight the attendant was still there. “It’s been towed.” “Towed! You towed my car!” “No, I don’t tow. A tow truck come.” “Did it have letters on the truck like ‘A’s?”  “I didn’t see. I was inside.” I called Triple A and the woman who answered said she didn’t know if they picked up my car. She couldn’t find it. “I was told it was picked up.” “I don’t see it.” “Can I speak to your manager?” She let out a sigh. She had been through this before. The manager said it was picked up but he didn’t know where it was. I was loud and woke up my husband. He said we would find it in the morning since now it was one. I couldn’t wait until morning. I went above my husband like I had gone above the woman. I texted my dad who then called me an hour later. “I found your car.” “What?” He had gone out in the middle of the night to my Honda dealer where he thought they had probably dropped off my car. He didn’t sound upset . My currant therapist says he does it because it makes him feel good. “No, he does it because he has to help me. He thinks I need the help like I still can’t take care of myself. Like I’m still sick. He doesn’t want me upset. He has done this since I was first sick with my bipolar.” I always call my dad when something happens such as getting lost two thousand miles away and he looked up on the computer how to get me where I was going. Further back to my twenties when I lost my job and he drove into the city just to see if I was Okay. To paint the apartment I was moving out of before moving to L.A. because I told the landlord I would not paint the apartment back to its original color. I was given permission to paint it. Way back to when he packed up my apartment after my suicide attempt.

Flying out to California to drive back home with me, but I didn’t ask, I never ask.

For my fiftieth birthday we baked a carrot cake. It is my favorite cake. It took five hours. It was a special cake from a book written by a famous pastry chef in New York. We’ve made a banana cream pie, strawberry and pistachio ice cream, eclairs and now brioche bread. He wants to bake French pastries, “the foundation of all pastries”, so we are baking those. Next are croissants. “Always read your recipes more than once. Lay out your ingredients before you bake.” He tells me this as he turns on the mixer and I add in the sugar and flour he has pre-measured. “These are the recipes to know. Everyone loves fresh baked pastries.”

My dad is seventy eight, he is officially old. He is moving on too, he has recently retired, and I am trying to show him I can survive without him. He is helping us with the business element of the bed and breakfast. This I asked him to. He had owned an accounting firm. When we finally open our bed and breakfast, which will take about three years, he might not be here. I hope he is, I need him to see me succeed. I must move on from him and my mother, I must move on from this storm and out of lost. I must move on from K and the shame of having bipolar.  

I have two bikes: the Lollygagger and Mr. Serious. Mr. Serious is a Cannondale road bike, the first bike my husband bought me. He brought home the Lollygagger for my forty seventh birthday. She is an 80’s red upright Schwinn with breaks I push back with my feet. She is my favorite bike.  I take the Lollygagger around on my own, with her I don’t feel lost and I feel the sun instead of the storm. With her I feel less afraid and full of possibilities. It’s a bike to ride in overalls and my hair in pigtails with my Converse gym shoes. I ride her to the coffee shop where I write, to run errands- to feel independent like I did the first time I drove away from dropping off my parents at the airport when I moved to L.A.  I must move on which is the most grown up thing I can do.

I haven’t rode her since the beginning of the Pandemic and she has sat sadly in the storage room with all the other forgotten bikes now covered in dust. If you run your finger over the seats dust comes off in a thick layer like the fur on my cat. I tell her I’m sorry as my husband takes her out of storage. He has locked her up on a wooden post beneath our building. He has changed her flat tire. Like my dad he does so much for me, too. When I told him I wanted to ride her again he smiled. Since I had ridden her last more lines have formed around his eyes. I think I spotted his tooth in the smile, the one with the chipped enamel. It is a little brown, like the faded brown on the filter of a smoked cigarette. It is my favorite tooth. He loves my crazy red hair which turned more than wavy, closer to a fiddlehead fern, when I turned forty six. My hairstylist says your hair changes every ten years. Lots of me are changing.

I unlock the Lollygagger and we go out to the street. I am wearing my overalls with a FooFighters t-shirt and mud and coffee stained red Converse gym shoes. My hair is free. I don’t wear sunglasses even though my eye doctor has told me too because my left eye has yellowed in the corner from the sun. I ride down our street past our apartment at 2327 W. Eastwood. I take Lawrence East towards the lake, past our old apartment at 5547 N. Lakewood, the place I thought we were happy but my husband says my depression began there. I ride further, four point seven miles to Evanston. I take Clark street which turns into Chicago Avenue to 900 Chicago Avenue where my parents live. One day I will ride past and my dad will no longer be there. My mom and I will sit on the couch drinking strong coffee and talk about things and talk about him.

My husband whose name begins with the second letter in the alphabet will drive off with me in one point five years to a new state in a new, smaller city with our two cats in the back seat in the first car I ever bought- a 2007 Honda Civic, a light sparkly tan, the car that had taken me to California and back again. We will be moving on. Moving on from a place, a subject, emotionally and mentally. I will have been found. I will sit in the passenger seat, or, maybe I will be doing something different. I will be in the driver’s seat with my husband looking out the window, the background noise of two cats crying as I look up in the mirror and watch an old life trail behind from every direction.