It is Friday afternoon. I am waiting for my bus in the college bar around the corner from the building I have spent all day conferencing student papers in, sipping whiskey and waiting on a chicken quesadilla. Today I woke to a pour of light, the sky clear and the day bright and full, brazen with promise, but I was stuck all day in the prison block of PLC, the oldest and ugliest building on campus, and now the clouds have reclaimed the sky and a bitter wind blew as I walked the block here. A few minutes, a whiskey, bridge between the long week and the open evening. The hardest week of the quarter, unending work on the queue, 50 conferences, 54 reader responses collected, graded, and returned, thirty essays graded, three classes taught, the heavy lifting all done. Lay me down, or something like. Bring on the bourbon, and the freedom of a morning I do not have to wake early with much work ahead.

And yet, I feel a shift in me, in my heart, these last weeks. In part it is that I have proof now I have been here too long-- I was asked last week to gather materials to support my promotion to 'senior instructor.' I had not intended to be senior anything until at least my seventies, but I see I failed to reckon with staying here too long. There will be a small raise for the same work if they approve promotion, validation of my commitment to teaching, I suppose, though really I think it is the English Department's own rules coming into play: keep someone too long, and you must salute their performance or show them the door. But really, what I feel is not professional in origin. I love teaching the kids no less or more than ever. Rather, I have the sense that it is time to quit blaming either this town or myself for what I want and do not have, and to see instead if there isn't some other way to be. I don't need to heal myself or change myself-- there is nothing innately wrong with me anymore than there is anything wrong with this town. I need to see beneath surfaces. To tell the truth, I have been sad and fearful-- of what I have lost, of loneliness, of failing to succeed even on my own terms. And I have told myself a story about how that was and came to be when really I need to face it, and stand up and move on.

These days, I am ready to walk. Past, into, and through. And in recognizing that, I feel better already.

Or perhaps that's just the whiskey.

But I suspect it's not. This morning, waking with so much light, I walked to the window, passed the point of the frame that blocked the actual orb and stood blinded and dazzled, washed in it, and I did feel cleansed. Today though the student queue was unending and many of the papers questionably crafted, the small satisfaction I always get when I see that a student has understood aggregated as it often hasn't lately, filling me with the small pleasure of having been useful and kind, and rather than growing tired late I felt better as I went, joking and smiling even through the ugliest of sentences, and when a student literally wrote that MLK JR came and freed the blacks from slavery as a joke-- I had said in class that once a student had written that, which was true-- I laughed long and hard. My quesadilla is here, and it is cheesy and greasy and good, and soon it will be time to walk to the bus through the last light of sunset silvering the rain that unsurprisingly has begun over the v-ed roof of the brick buildings across the street and the sidewalk thronging with students with heads buried in hoods, and soon I will go out to that sidewalk and catch the bus that will be coming, and go to the climbing gym still a little liquored and climb until sober, and later tonight I will see what there is under this sky, clear or cloudy, in the green valley where I was born. I will not expect answers, and I will not find any, but that is alright, as I am alright. And I hope, friend, that you are too.