Independence Day.

April 13, 2000. (I still have that plastic filing cabinet.)

Ten years ago yesterday, at just shy of 19, I left the town in which I grew up to move north to New Hampshire. Thus, last night was the 10-year anniversary of the first overnight in my own apartment. I didn’t move to a dorm room or a college campus and I didn’t go with a friend or to a friend. I left town at 18 for multiple reasons that I will sum up here as: I wanted to go. New Hampshire, where I knew nobody and nobody knew me, is simply where I went.

When I woke the morning after the move (10 years ago today) I remember trying to keep my eyes closed as I lay in my bed, thinking that if I didn’t open them then the choice I had made to leave and the deep loneliness I felt upon waking, wouldn’t be real. But open them I did and, indeed, that strange and disorienting feeling of waking in an unfamiliar room thrust me into my new reality. I then took the five steps into the kitchen of the small studio apartment I was renting (my first apartment, of course) and sat at the counter forcing myself to eat a Lender’s onion bagel---I could only get half down---and reading from a compilation of essays by humor columnist Dave Barry with the hope that a laugh could rescue me from the pit of solid dread which had settled in my stomach a couple of weeks before the move and stayed there ever since. Also, I had promised myself I would read every morning and write every day. (There were so many things I would do in this new life, I thought.)

My mom bought the bagels for me the night before. Cream cheese, too. Some canned soup, juice, jelly, a jar of peanut butter. On moving day my mom and dad drove much of my stuff up in their van and the rest was in my little gray Hyundai which I drove up with a sister’s boyfriend who had become a good friend over the years and offered to help. After unpacking my stuff, he and my dad went on a drive for most of the day while my mom stayed with me in the apartment Lysol-ing and scrubbing everything down. (Only later, when I was moving out of that particular apartment mere weeks later, did she tell me she had seen mouse droppings under the sink.) She helped me to set up my bureaus and bed, put some new dishes she had bought for me in the cabinets and, since I didn’t yet have curtains, she hung a sheet over my kitchen window so that I couldn’t be looked in on. As the hours passed while we set up and her departure from the apartment and trip back to RI neared, my dread built. I wanted her not to leave. I wanted so desperately for her to just stay there with me overnight. I might have even said this. Or I might not have. We went out for dinner and before they all headed home my mom had my dad stop at a convenient store where she grabbed up the bagels and other groceries as her last act of mothering before leaving her youngest daughter all alone in a new apartment, in a new town, in a new state. When I told my mom that yesterday was the anniversary of this day through a cell phone text, she wrote back: “Don’t remind me. That was so hard. I was so worried about you.”

I cried when they left. The last few weeks before departure were marked with many spontaneous eruptions of tears. I wished that I could stop this crying but without warning the fear rose up and out (making me and whomever I was speaking with very uncomfortable). I wanted to go just as much as I didn’t or else I wouldn’t have stayed. At 18, and the simplicity of this for me was a blessing (as simplicity often eludes me now), fear was just fear. It’s a concept I am only just getting back to now. I didn’t disguise it with obligation to whatever scenario I was too frightened to change as I sometimes do now. Fear was just fear. I don’t think I ever actually spoke the words “I’m afraid” (and perhaps I’ve just found a perk of 28 in that I can speak them now) but I recognized that I was terrified to make this move and that I was going to do it anyway.

Yesterday, 10 years later, I wrestled with this same decision: to stay or go. My mom was of course weakened by the second round of chemo (though, thankfully, she reports feeling much stronger today) and I was torn about leaving and returning to NH. I thought that maybe I should stay the full week down there---this is chemotherapy we’re talking about and it hasn’t even been a week since the treatment---but I also knew I had writing projects that I needed to get to and responsibilities in my life here to keep up with. It was time to go, I finally decided (with help from my mom who told me the same).

As I drove over the bridge and away from Rhode Island I thought about making that same drive all those years ago. Driving over that river in either direction is always rich with emotion. I thought about how two of my life’s biggest challenges are bookending this decade. I thought about how much had changed in regard to what I was now driving to...driving home to. A different town, a different life. A family in Dan. I thought about what had changed in Rhode Island. Nieces and nephews, in-laws, cancer. I wondered what would be different 10 years from now...

I thought about what I knew at 18 and what I know at 28. I wondered what I would understand better at 38.

On some matters, I think 18-year-old Lola will always be the clearest of thinkers:

April 14, 2000

“Still having a hard time thinking long-term on this but thinking more about not turning back.”

I wrote that sentence 10 year ago today. It seems like a contradictory statement (and in the journal I follow it with “Does that make sense?”) but I understand what I meant: I don’t know exactly how I will go on, but I know I will.

Was I writing a journal entry today, I might write these very same words. In that way, nothing much has changed in these past 10 years. I still don’t know what lay ahead, but off I go.