Saturday, May 3, 2014

20140503.1007

I am given to understand it is Free Comic Book Day. Time was that I would have been waiting im/patiently in line, talking about penciled and inked and colored lines on the page and (not always) witty dialogue with others of the nerdy persuasion. (Real nerds, not the fashionable pseudo-nerds that inundate current popular culture.) I do not now, but not from scorn of the thing; indeed, I feel the allure. No, I do not do so because I have work to do and a daughter who needs my attention, and because I need sleep to be able to do that work and offer my daughter attention. And, in all fairness, I have been removed from the comic book community for so long that I would not know how to get back into it in any way that would make sense.

It is not the only community I think I would have trouble returning to. I have before noted a sense of moving on, a sense entirely appropriate given the circumstances, and it is not the first time that I have had such a sense. I have often felt as though I have been moving on from things--probably because I have been. My parents, brother, and I moved repeatedly during my childhood, and not long after my parents found a place to settle, I went off to college. I did return, although the circumstances were not entirely what I could have wished; I mean no offense to my parents in saying so, for they were greatly accommodating (and I paid rent), but I was not in a good place, personally, at that time, and living with parents in one's early twenties is hardly a validation. (Not that I did much dating...)

College itself saw me move around in fields of inquiry. It saw friends come and go, and it at length saw me walk its grounds one last time as a student before I moved on to graduate work. There, I repeated many of the same things, meeting new people and seeing them leave until my own turn to head out came in 2009. Then I moved to New York, to the Best of the Boroughs within The City, where everyone was moving on, and quickly, as I have noted. I was fortunate to be able to take part in several communities there, including the New York Aikikai and the United Methodist Church of the Village; I benefited greatly from doing so, and I have no doubt that they would allow me back among them without hesitation did I move back to The City or its environs.

That does not seem likely, though, and I find that I try too much to recreate the experience without having access to those people who made the experiences possible. I find that I cling to the past, or that I have been doing so, and that it is futile for me to do such a thing. And with that realization, I have begun to move on again--and once again I feel somehow guilty for leaving behind good things and adrift because so many of the things that had given shape to my days are no longer where I can get to them. Or I am no longer where I can get to them...

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