You Can’t Ask Alice Anything Anymore.
Like, I’m in Beach Town.

This is how I felt when I woke up this morning, as if I’d teleported from Atlanta to here, rather than paying half-a-thousand dollars for a UHaul and packed it up in the rain with Marshall, then drove in tandem with him, communicating via walkie-talkie - down I-20, up I-95 and over to here - eight hours in all through the un-air-conditioned mug, my drugged cat in the seat next to me never quite drugged enough to stop meowing in slurred bewilderment, his third, shining eyelids draped halfway across his glazed, tearing eyes, turning around and around in his plastic blue carrier, asking me, it seemed, the same thing I was asking myself this weekend, “Why is this? What is this?”
And as if we hadn’t arrived here in the twilight on Sunday and unloaded it all from car and from truck in several hours; Marshall and me, hefting bureau after desk after box of books up the narrow steps and around the corner into my new, tiny apartment till the sweat ran not rivers but sheets (Sheets are wider than rivers) down our faces and our backs and our fronts.

I woke up this morning alone, and I miss Marshall terribly. Otherwise, I feel not-yet-sad for my old life in Atlanta and not at all settled in this one; I feel instead like I’m in limbo. I, who usually have a ravenous energy for nest-making, am finding it hard to work up the energy to unpack and settle in. I don’t feel like this place where I know no one can really be my home. I feel dread at the prospect. This is not the right foot, Henshaw.

I may very well talk to no one in person today and I’m feeling very lone-tree-in-the-foresty. And very numb. Did I say that, Henshaw? That’s where the first sentence in this entry comes from; there’s this pulp novel that I and a million other teenager girls tore through from the 70s called Don’t Ask Alice. It purports to be the actual found diary of a teen drug addict, and in one entry, after you’re supposed to believe she’s been in recovery back with her parents safe in suburbia with kittens and shampoo and baking, one entry suddenly begins with the sentence, “Like, I’m in San Francisco.” Because she’s back off the wagon, man! And, being there on the side of that road, she’s also really stoned and listless as she writes. (The book’s forward says some of the entries like this one were found on paper bags and such; the ones where she didn’t even have her diary with her but was instead rolling around Golden Gate Park with dozens of other dope fiends.) Cautionary tale. Adventure travel can be not experiencing everything, but rather the opposite ‘cause the new place does not feel real, so watch out. Different topic, Henshaw. I digress; I apologize. Haven’t talked to anyone in a while. I know it’ll improve.

Because yeah, I have this big old To Do list that in many big and small ways includes shifting my identity over: getting a student ID and parking pass, getting a North Carolina driver’s license and voting card and working toward Becoming a Resident. Which is just the thing, I know. Just the thing to make me feel better, like there’s this process and I’m in control of it – charged up instead of just a plug yanked out from la vida.