Wonder Boy Lives

These are my last few weeks in Massachusetts before I leave, first for Michigan, then for Arizona. I've been spending them in my childhood home, thinking about the past and the looming, all-too-soon future. I am leaving the worst of my life behind in Massachusetts. Leaving my struggles in high school and at Wellesley with my mental illness, and leaving too the violence and mess of my last break-up before I married my husband. But I am also leaving my childhood family and the haunts of my life up until now, the hiking trails and hiding places where I used to go, and the few friends that I have managed to make.

I was in Plymouth yesterday with my grandfather and my husband, touring the Jenney Grist Mill and a few hidden-away places my grandfather has found over the years. I learned a lot about grinding corn.in a presentation accompanied with actual ground corn in various stages of solid and not, which marked the first time in my life that I've been excited to touch ground corn. It's some quality inherent in museum presentations, I think: it makes you just want to run your hands over everything. We left the Mill to go wander the grounds, coming across the graffiti in the picture as we went. Wonder Boy lives. Who is Wonder Boy, and why does he live, and why write such a thing on a little bridge in Plymouth? My life seems full of mystery lately.

We are packing for Michigan in bits and pieces. So many of my items are invested with memories that deciding to bring them alone or leave them behind feels like deciding which parts of myself to keep and which to let go. I know that I'm bringing my little corked jar with its rosebud and lavender, a gift from two kind pagans in Pennsylvania; my altar items are coming too, bowl and blade, candles and carvings, and I could say that religion is about growing towards the future as much as it is finding roots in the past. My great collection of Stephen King books, bought at used bookstores for quarters on and off throughout the years, is staying behind to make room for books that I haven't read yet, although a few treasured ones are sneaking in with the Arizona pile. The Marceline doll my friend sewed for me is coming, and so is my skull. The schoolwork I kept from my college classes is most definitely staying behind. The poems I wrote for my ex, the ones that were returned after the relationship went up in flames, are staying behind. I may set those on fire. I haven't decided yet.

I'm watching my husband make his own decisions. The books that he brought from Michigan almost a year ago are going back in their boxes; blankets and trinkets are being wrapped back up again for another road trip with Arch Enemy on the speakers and the sun on the windshield.

Some parts of our life are already waiting for us in Arizona. Tucson itself is waiting; the furniture we've inherited from Jack's family is waiting; the mountains where I will watch the sun set over many future months are waiting; the sand and gravel where I will walk is waiting. There are comic books in stock in stores that I will buy, and tea that I will bring back to our apartment, and tables where I will write. These parts wait for us like puzzle pieces we haven't yet put together.

June has been bittersweet, and is now halfway over. I want to bring both everything and nothing, to hold on to all of my past and to start over completely new.

Wonder Boy lives.

I guess we'll see what happens.