it's 7:19 pm, on September 11, 2002 - carolyn's new commute.

~

Carolyn has been living in my head for a year, and she was supposed to be more subversive than confused.

~*~

It has been a year since Carolyn moved out to the coast, a year since she left her first husband and child, alone in New York City with the subway and trains. The west coast, suits her.

She began by taking the train to work, taking it to remind herself that there's a bit of New York wherever she goes, but by her third month in she's driving. Instead of distancing herself from people by staring out the window at trees, now she's clutching, reversing, speeding up, breaking, staring out her windshield straight ahead and at the backs of cars. Always the fronts of buildings, the backs of cars.

Her commute remains the same distance, though now she cannot say she's saving the environment. Carolyn has become a consumer. Carolyn, in her bid for peace and serenity, even more so in her bid for solitude, has given up righteousness and become just like everybody else. The single occupancy commuter: one of the single most hated things in Western society, the very symbol of consumerism.

She likes her car. It's comfortable.

It has been a year since she's traded skyscrapers for mountains, ever present mountains whereever she looks. They're as part of the sky as the clouds, and the sun and the moon -- As back east, the glass rising straight, high, eerily silent. No longer does she expect manmade structures to look down upon her, and when they do it is a bit of a shock. In just a year she's forgotten windows fifty stories high.

New York is no longer something familiar. And neither are the assumptions that go along with living there. Carolyn is a citizen of the west coast and Carolyn's assumptions are shaken daily. There is a dissonence of memory, a unpredictable yet un-hostile atmosphere, climate. There are no seasons

There is an unpredictability surrounding the climate, the atmosphere. There is a lack of seasons. Things change but never in the same pattern twice. Long stretches of cloud, long stretches of rain. Bright, sunny days. Hailstones.

And it's not as if it's possible to set a calendar by the seasons in the east, rather, they are less surprising there. Next to the Pacific Ocean, everything natural seems startling even as it is all around her. Everything unnatural is startling too. Life is startling.

Everything is startling because most everything is new. There is no history. There is no European history. No flavor. And everything that is old has been here far longer than any European civilization. We are startled because *we* are the foreigner here. That mentality has never changed.

~

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what would sith be nostalgic about anyway - November 24, 2015
moving truck dilemma - October 28, 2015
- - July 19, 2015
- - July 01, 2015
bruise - June 29, 2015

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