'It is always late summer here.'

Something I will miss dearly about Ann Arbor is the lovely blend of coffee that you see to the left of this paragraph. This coffee has gotten me through many a morning, particularly this year. Aside from this particular coffee, Espresso Royale is the best coffee shop ever. They have $2 lattes on Wednesdays, and when they pair up with Ann Arbor's awesome local radio station for 'Martin Bandyke's Caffeinated Comfort Zone' and the cheesiest/most rad local DJ goes and sits at various Espresso Royale locations in town and broadcasts... well, it's fantastic.

Sadly, they didn't have my favorite coffee or my favorite little pre-wrapped vegan granola bar thingees today. So already my morning kind of sucks.

I can't wait to have a job where I am not in charge of anyone else. I tell you now, I am not cut out for supervision. This is something that I always suspected. I am far too independent (and youthfully selfish) to think of anyone else when making decisions or doing anything, really. So excuse me, lady that I supervise, if I decide that cutting two sizes of scrap paper is completely unnecessary and mind-numbingly inefficient and I therefore decide to cut only one size from now on. I didn't realize that this detail was such a crucial part of your life and that you would get personally offended by my decision. No, you're right, I really needed to run that by you beforehand. Are you kidding me?! Is it any wonder that I want to get out of here? I'm starting to feel that this extra week I decided to work strictly to make money just isn't going to be worth it when compared to the fragment of my soul that will die while I wait for August 8th to roll around. I guess it's not that bad. But that's probably only because the end is in sight and when there are people (one person in particular, actually) squawking at me, it's in one ear and swiftly out the other.

Because in the face of this summer and my near future, it's getting pretty impossible for me to get too upset about anything. To be sure, I have moments of serious doubt. I had one just this morning while I rode the staff elevator up to the third floor and wondered if maybe I should start thinking seriously about a serious full-time job in Portland so that I can possibly save enough money to travel come January. But what kind of job? What, sweet mother of pearl, are my transferable skills, and how will I find a job that won't make me feel like I'm ruining the planet or scamming the general public?

I need to cast off my guilt complex for the next two weeks and start to feel ok about leaving the staff here to figure out what to do when I leave. Of course they will get by - it's a library and it's a library that is about to shut down, at that. They'll figure out how to function without me. I will, of course, take steps to make the transition easy, but I am by no means going to spend too much time worrying about it.

Yesterday, after getting reamed out and accused of being a racist by my cantankerous supervisee, I headed home and got in to my bed (my ultimate defense mechanism and retreat). I scrolled through my phone to find someone, anyone!, to call and coax cheer from. I called a friend in Portland, because I figured there was no time like the present to expose my emotional messiness. We chatted. It helped - a lot, actually. And he read me this poem, which is even more beautiful now that I read it again:

Moment Vanishing

by Elizabeth Spires

Now, in the quietude of evening, the dove comes.
It does not flash its feathers, does not
make a sound, but feeds on what the finches
leave behind. How little it needs.
A few hard seeds. A drop of water.

It is late summer. It is always
late summer here. The air is hot and dry.
Brown leaves lie like hands in the yard.
There is no place to turn. No place to stop.
We are hurried along, pushed farther into our lives.

Moments are vanishing all over the earth
as bombs explode, the victim is hooded,
great populations scatter on endless dust roads.
It is too much. We avert our eyes.
We wait like children for the coming of the dove.

And if I were allowed a question,
one question, of the evening dove
who asks for nothing, whose pleasure
is a few small seeds, whose heart I covet,
I would ask, O what will I become?

Lovely, right? I think I will be in good hands out there. Anyone who has the good sense to read me a poem when I'm sad is someone I can get behind. Brown leaves lie like hands in the yard. Come on! That's beautiful.

On the phone he told me to try not to expect too much from my move. To just come out here, relax, and maybe figure some stuff out about myself. It's hard not to expect that this move will be the decision of my life - and that suddenly everything will make sense once I step off the plane and touch Oregonian soil. But. I suppose that nothing is ever that simple, is it?

I will try to keep my head up today. And if it falls, I will think to the 8th, and then to the 30th, and then I will read that poem again.