(Not) Nova Scotia

The third time I wake up it's just before 6am: I've weathered another stormy insomniac night. The sun will be coming up soon, or would be, if it weren't pouring rain outside. Again.

I decide to go to Nova Scotia.

When I lived in New York and got these moods, it was Montauk—an impulsive exodus popularized by Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. Now that I'm farther from home, I need to branch out, and a frigid peninsula off the Atlantic coast seems as good a place as any.

I'm supposed to be at work in three hours but the idea of going to work today, or ever again, is inconceivable. On the other hand, the idea of getting on a train with a big wad of cash and no return ticket—very conceivable.

How long can I be gone, I wonder, before they have no choice but to fire me?

How long can I be gone, I wonder, before anyone even notices?

Did you know that the word "ravel" and the word "unravel" mean exactly the same thing?

* * *

Most people reading this blog know me, or think they do. Maybe you do. Or maybe you don't really know me till you've seen me with a belly full of Klonopin and red wine, fleeing for some faraway land.

The first time I left California I hadn't managed to get the Pacific Ocean sand out of my shoes before I was dipping my toes in the Atlantic. It took me three days to move from one coast to the other, and into a new identity. Before then I'd fled Philadelphia, and before that London, a tenure that was over before it started. I leave. It's what I do. Why should today be any different?

Why should all the work I've done toward becoming stable and reliable be worth anything, when it's pitted against my nature?

There's something about a train that's magic.

* * *

The train, it turns out, doesn't go to Nova Scotia. Instead I buy an arbitrary ticket to Amherst. It seems tawdry by comparison (i.e., they use American dollars there), but I have some nostalgia for the place, and anyway, the destination isn't the point. Escape is the point.

I forgot the train station is a little ways outside of town; after a short walk I settle in at a cafe on the main street and finally wonder what the fuck I'm doing in Amherst. It's a really good coffee, by the way, but still maybe not worth the trip. The trip is about something else, and I still haven't figured out what.

Even transience eventually becomes inertia.

I write a few old-fashioned letters from the cafe and drop them in a mailbox by the old movie theatre, and then hop a train back to Boston.

I should have gone to Canada.

Oh well. There's always the next breakdown...