Tonight I’m reclaiming the house in a surge of nostalgia for those months when I lit all the candles each night and turned up the music loud to let it flow out the open windows across the rooftops and the little orange squares of lighted rooms to the masterful towers in the distance, as if the things that emanated from this little apartment rode out and up somehow and reached those powerhouses, influencing decrees and having some secret impact on the city.

My life was so tidy then. Simple, if busy. I miss it.

I’m in between projects again and forgetting the worry about next month’s money. I’ll worry next month when there is none. Instead, I’m making things move in the other direction. And maybe now there is some momentum that will continue after I begin work again, whenever it is that I will be working again. Soon, I hope.

I have a clearer sense of where I’m headed now, which is good. That it takes so long is difficult to bear.

Purposeful change always takes a long time. No one ever talks about that. I have never read any truthful account of it anywhere. I am just learning it, slowly, laboriously, tediously. Three years to complete the end of a relationship, two years and counting to change careers. Is this why adults push so hard for young people to make choices, and most urgently, to make the right ones? Most of us never do. Even when we look successful and happy, how much of that was due to agency and not just clinging to a procession someone else started for us? How bad is it to follow a path already laid, anyway?

Now, when I am working hard to change this ship’s course, I feel as though I’m caught in a tide and being swept, submissively, wherever it will take me. I feel the weight of my subconscious on the back of my tongue seeping a litany of doubt: How did I get here? Where am I going? Do I want this? What do I want?

Someone please decide.

Where is that fate to lift this burden of agency?

(Or is it the duplicitous arms of fate clutching at my attempted escape that makes this confusion?)

One thing is slowly becoming certain: I am more comfortable with myself than I have ever been. Social situations are easier to face. Other people’s personalities contrast sharply with mine and do not affect me hardly as much.

I had lunch yesterday with Rose. Long lost Rose. Persistent Rose. My unexpected, unlikely acquaintence. She keeps us connected and I appreciate, deeply, that consistency. I would have let us drift apart because she was collateral to those dangerous relationships of a few years ago. Together, we were all some kind of toxic molecule. Over time, those heavier elements have simply dropped free. Now, I feel an ease with her that allows enjoyment and candor and the riches of her life’s variances from mine.

(I can’t be everything; I need other people to make a full life.)

This easiness is a big sigh, like folding all the way over and letting your wrists rest on the floor and your arms fold over them like ribbon.

I have been walking the blocks to yoga listening to music on the headphones. It's a stroll along halfway-house row, past the residents silently doing calisthenics or smoking cigarettes on the stoop. They have this haunting way of watching you walk the entire length of the property, their heads revolving slowly and in unison. A lot of old people live along the route, too. They watch also, but they engage passersby, smiling or saying hello from their hollowed-out bodies.

They’re used to a world where people greet each other. They want to connect and it breaks my heart. They are all my gma.

I miss her.

Three quarters of year now since she died and new strains of grief continue to roll through. It’s been long enough that I feel the pangs of impossible contact. I long for one more. I see myself changing, becoming stronger, gentler, more selfless—better able to love. What I am capable of saying or doing now that I couldn’t before simply because I can better transcend my own experience! I see the evidence of growing older and the slow accumulation of wisdom. The pace is only breathtaking when there are no more chances, otherwise it is almost imperceptible.

This is powerlessness, not having more time.

But thank god for time's slow plodding constancy! (Why do we insist on bending it?) It lets you imagine a long string of years that make a life out of many, albeit lengthy, transitions which you can look back upon and call agency… or serendipity.