moving

It's been so long since I've written that I'd forgotten what my last entry was about. It was about the surf contest in New York. M and I are in California now, and in a funny turn of events, a similar contest is taking place here in San Francisco. Neither place was a likely venue for such an event (none had ever taken place in Long Island before and this is the first in SF in thirty years), and the timing worked out that we caught the last one as we were leaving the East Coast and are catching this one just we arrived to the West Coast. Having something bracket our road trip seems to confirm our sense that this decision, which outwardly seems random and spontaneous, is right. Not just in the way that things end up right, but that it was meant to be this way.

To tell people before we left that I was moving, seemed to be a little inaccurate. We spent a month and a half on the road before getting to the Bay Area, we'll be here for a month before I spend half of December on the East Coast going on interviews and he's back on the East then too for the holidays, and then I'll be abroad and back in New Haven for two months, and we haven't planned for much after that. Because we're moving around so much, the end of the move--what characterizes a move--isn't too tangible.

Among the things we share, this flexibility is one of the most valuable to me. Being on the road is special in how easy it is to go somewhere/anywhere. M is actively open and actively adventurous, which gives our experiences an added layer of newness and absorption, a layer that almost becomes the experience itself.

We've established a mini-life in San Francisco. Mini in the sense that we're just here for about a month, mini in the sense that our routine is dictated by our impulses and has the time-feel of a vacation. So even though this feels like settled-ness compared to essentially living in our car, it's not how we would "live" if we were settling down somewhere. Though it's not exactly vacation either, because we're not going out doing vacation things every day. We just do what sustains us on a daily basis: cook and clean, climb and swim(for me)/surf(for him), explore the city intermittently, bum around regularly, be silly with the cat and each other. So sometimes, even with the ability to move anywhere, the choice to stay still for a bit feels pretty liberating.

And so even though I can't really accurately describe to you what we're doing in a label--not quite moving, not quite traveling, not quite nothing--I can say that it's good, very good. And that feeling moves me most.