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Contentedness, for me, lies in exploration.  There are new things everywhere.  It’s easy to forget, but most of us have never even seen the inside of our neighbor’s homes.  (Never mind the unexplored cities, states, countries!)  When I’m troubled, depressed, slow, whining, crying, shouting, hiding out, this is the one idea that can help.  I don’t need a plane ticket (although that would be fantastic, so feel free to send one along if you’re feeling generous!  I’ll go just about anywhere!), I just need to sneak around a neighborhood I don’t know or meet some new people.

Today I bought a crystal butter dish from one of the loveliest trans women I’ve ever met, at a garage sale in Royal Oak.  She complimented my hair, which I had been irrationally crying over just hours before.  This maybe more than anything was necessary today.  No one has ever spent more time looking fabulous than this lady, and she liked my hair.

Coincidence is annoying and time consuming to hear about, but it keeps me going, so if you’re reading this, you are just going to have to cope.

At this same garage sale I snagged a hardcover copy of Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls for $1, which wouldn’t be that amazing if it weren’t for the fact that I was already considering sneaking off from my quick errand to read The Glass Castle by the SAME AUTHOR, because it’s an absolutely amazing book (and also because it was already in my car.)

Obviously, my sneaking, time-stealing ways were meant to be.  I took two hours.  ALL TO MYSELF.  NO ONE KNOWS WHERE.  But I did read the whole time, so I didn’t get into too much trouble.

Later, after baby bath times and dishes and vacuuming, I took a good long night walk all around our area, past houses I didn’t know, along the service drive for the highway, through the dark neighborhood.  I walked until my knee was sick of my shit.  I poured over Walls’ story, the horses, the floods, the ambition unacknowledged.

I didn’t go far, but I’m going to bed with the images of new houses, the faces of new people, the echoes of new words.  I’ll sleep with a bigger world wrapped around myself.  It’s amazing the difference it makes.

That damn butter dish brought it to me.  I actually don’t love it.  I will have to keep looking.  Garage sale season ain’t quite over.