Moving.

With very little to do these days now that school is done and I am just sitting around waiting for my future-employer to process my papers, I spend most of my day sleeping, waking up around one or two hours pass noon.  I slide around in my sheets for a dozen-so minutes.  Then I muster the courage to pull my feet out of a pillowcase that I use for warmth and force both flat on the cold wood floors.  That is the biggest hurdle of my entire day. 

After I pull on my robe, everything seems to be just time fillers. Most days I just watch Korean dramas, American TV shows and the random Netflix recommended rentals in the kitchen.  Occasionally, I would run to the store, rub a bit of spice on a red slab of beef for the grill or drive out to do silly errands.  I find any excuse to leave the house before it gets dark. 

And these past few days, driving around St. Louis in the afternoon rain through the same routes that I have been taking for the last 10-ish year, something is gloomily telling me that I will miss this place.  Though I have never admitted to calling a city like such home.  With its silly racism and its awfully narrow segments of stolen cultures from the bigger cities overtaking the actual culture that is St. Louis, I am almost embarrassed sometimes when I tell people about this city that I inhabited for many years.  Yet, I get this weird feeling.  This worry when I think about moving for good to a new city.  The feeling is like…

You know when you spend your entire night up doing something incredibly stupid like reading a book, baking a cake, or wrapping your own wonton dumplings.  Or simply just thinking so much that you can’t fall asleep as you switch sleeping positions for the nth time.  Then you shower because you are too sweaty from the exhaustion of not sleeping.  You get back into bed and you realize that the sun is rising.  And through your curtains you see the sky turning a soft bright grey color.  You get this awful resentment of your inability to sleep but you relish in the warmth and comfort of your own sheets.  That incredibly knot in your stomach that tells you that you will miss most of your day and by sleeping you are abandoning certain responsibilities and daily adventures you owe yourself.  Yet the familiarity of your own bed and the fluffiness of your seven pillows stop you from forcing yourself down on the cold floor.  You want sleep but at the same time resent your bed for making you immobile. So you end up staying in bed awake debating and talking yourself out of the situation.   The whole mess is fine balance of the comfort of familiarity and the trap of being immobile. 

St. Louis is like my messy bed at the crack of dawn.  I owe it to myself to get out. Out of the Midwest, out of St. Louis, out of bed.  Most days I sit around waiting for a final end to a chapter of my life.  Most days I lose the battle between my wants and my bed.  And I walk around my house looking for pieces that I can take with me to remind me of my mom’s kitchen and the small house we grew up in.  Occasionally, I would try to drive around the city looking for something I can pack and ship to Seattle.  And in between, I just watch TV.