In a week, a lot can happen.

This moment, my body is abuzz on caffeine and adrenaline.

This morning, I awoke to a dripping ceiling, a hungry and confused cat, a hang over, and a hurting tummy. 

This Friday’s commute met me with fog and rain and humidity and weary, restless travellers.

Last night, one of my oldest, dearest friends and I sat across from one another and feasted on french cheeses, red grapes, a baguette, olives, chicken, dates, rhubarb spread, asparagus, avocado, tomatoes, and wine—lots of wine—and on memories of our lives as young twenty-somethings living it up in Washington, DC, when we were broke but happy, when our nights were spent dancing a pathway home at 2 a.m., bringing men along with us sometimes and, other times, making the trek alone, but not ever really alone, because we always had one another.

Yesterday, I found out I’m going to China for 8 days in early June.  I leave in three weeks.

This week, I struggled through several brutally intense and difficult yoga classes.  I wanted to weep on my mat.  But, I kept going back.  I always do.

On Wednesday, I learned he’s leaving soon.

Later, that same day, I cried.  Not because of him.  But because the person I most wanted to show excitement and enthusiasum for me, my life, my plans, my news, couldn’t give me the time of day.

On Tuesday, I wrote, on a scrap of paper on my drive home from work, “In my haste—because this life is going so very fast—I want everything, everything, to be poetic.”  Some greater meaning or piece of writing lies within that statement.  I haven’t sat down and started digging it out yet.

On the radio one morning this week—I don’t remember which day, and it does not matter—I heard the old Neil Young song “Helpless.”  I hadn’t heard the tune in years, but I quickly turned up the volume, eased my foot off the gas, slowed down, so as not to miss a moment of the melody.

And this lyric—this one lyric struck me and stuck with me, all week, each day,  from dawn to dusk.  Even now, I am laying in a field that is this song, and I am picking at its lines like blades of grass, one by one by one, and I am fashioning bows and knots into a necklace of Neil’s words.

And in my mind,
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

I looked at my old friend across the table last night and thought, “There—with her.  All my changes are there.”

And on my yoga mat this week, I looked myself in the eyes, and I watched my body rise up and ripen within the palm of my hand, and I thought, “Here—in this hot room.  In the cup of my hand, in the heart of my heart.  All of my changes are there.”

And in a recent exchange with him, that love, that man of my past, I sat with the piercing realization: “There—even if he didn’t see, even if he didn’t understand.  I changed; I changed.”

All my changes—there. 

I want to say to my friends, my family, my yoga, my loves, my ghosts:  “There.  Look closely.  You will see me, in all my pieces.”

In the reflection of the wine glass, in the sheen on my shoulder, in the curl of my hair, in the script on the page, in the length of my limbs, in the height of my laughter, in the corner of my heart, in the puddles on these beautiful, Boston streets.

All my changes are there.

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