It’s been a long few weeks.
It’s 5:15 pm as I begin writing this. I’m sitting at a little round table inside Panera Bread in Raleigh, North Carolina. There’s a big window to my right, though the blinds are pulled only halfway up, so I can see only a portion of the overpopulated parking lot outside. The sky is growing dim, the air is looking colder, and the constant rush of traffic continues to flow. A bit of jazz is on in the background here, slow and understanding, the kind that makes you feel good about being melancholy. I’m transitioning.
Really, I’m perpetually transitioning I guess. I’m growing, so it seems, in a direction that’s more diagonal than straight upward, though diagonal is much more interesting than any other direction I believe. Part of me wants to stop, to settle, to live in a “normal” moment for once. Maybe in a house with a table and a few chairs, a living room and a few pieces of art on the walls. Part of me wants to simply bask in the abnormality of “normal”. Yet another part of me pulls hard in a diagonal direction, away from “normal”, back to transition where I’ve lived for many years. The struggle, it seems, is home. More so than either one place, the conflict between still and moving, between transition and placidity - this is where I reside.
And for all my writing and fussing, I rather enjoy it.
I’m moving back to Raleigh in a few weeks. From Boone, where I’ve lived for two years. Still I need to write my letters of thank you to that town for the way that it’s shown me myself.
*****
You never really hear solo clarinets that much in coffee-shop jazz. It’s a pretty conflicted instrument, I guess, what with its ability to carry a tune in a three piece combo and in a 300 piece orchestra alike. Jazzy and classical. Fluid and austere. Here. There. There’s one on now.