judecorp | And now it's time for the breakdown.

I don't want to go back to Columbus.

It's not because of the people there (well, most of them). After all, I have

hopemcg. And then there's Megan and Bucky and Cary and Velma and Stephanie and Rob. And I wouldn't mind seeing the OSU people again, especially Christa and Sonal and Nick and Christen. And it would be cool if I had a class with Jonathan this quarter. There are some cool people in Klumbis and I like them very much.

And it's not because there's nothing to do. I love the seats at the Lennox, and I love going to weird restaurants with Cary. I absolutely love seeing The Reaganomics. January brings GLBT Awareness Weeks at work, and we have lots of cool stuff planned, like Michelle Malone (mmm) and Denise Uyehara and Lani Ka'ahumanu. Ani is supposedly coming this spring and I want to find out the details on that. And there are other things, like volunteering at Kaleidoscope and the internship at Children's. And there's

geocaching, of course.

It's going to be very hard for me to go back there. Columbus is a place of incredible accomplishment for me academically and career-wise, but it is also a place of formidable tragedy and perceived failure. Columbus is where I will formally end my marriage, which is both a necessity and a loathesome chore. Columbus equals monotony in a lot of ways - stale air, confining spaces, restriction. Columbus = Levensailor.

There's no ocean in Columbus (duh) and that means more to me than most other things. It's not so bad to be in a landlocked area, except that the ocean is quite possibly the most important physical thing in the world to me. People were making fun of me in Delaware, but it really did physically recharge me to walk along the shore, to hear the crashing of waves and to smell the salt spray. When my plane was landing in Providence, I was elated by the sight of seagulls. ("No limits, Jonathan?") The ocean is in me, and it /is/ me. It is with a heavy heart that I remember the vast expanse of shore... and the sun rising from its salty depths.

So I don't want to go back. I don't want to be here in my Dad's apartment, either, but I would rather be here than there. I don't want to go back to living with A. I don't want to go back to missing nearly every single person that I love. I don't want to go back to the frantic running around of two jobs and a full course load and the need to work out legal issues and resumes. I want to go back to the beach. The beach wasn't real, not in the sense that my job and my internship and my classes are real. But it is real in me. And I want it back. Now.

~//~

Two of my dearest friends are hurting right now, and it is tearing me apart. I hate feeling useless. There's nothing more depressing than a useless superhero.