i've put you in my suitcase

i'm sitting in my room, on the floor, in the middle of heaps of stuff i'm stuffing in boxes.

i'm flying to LA on friday morning. early friday morning. and i'm not coming back.

i'm scared and sad and nostalgic and don't even know where to begin sorting the books i want to bring...

but i don't feel alone, because these last few weeks have been filled with so much love. and eventhough i can't listen to it, it puts me in mind of a song by Devendra Banhart, that, when i listened to it in March, i knew would characterize this particular feeling accurately: confused remembrance and clinging-on. wanting things to stay the same, but knowing that a kind of soft embrace of the impending future and all its changes is necessary to continue living without getting left behind. i dunno, that's what i'm trying to tell myself right now anyway, as i carefully place my things into a suitcase one pound at a time.

in between the layers of soft (borrowed) clothes, frames and pictures. if i can't have these faces in the flesh, i'll settle for them behind glass. (and i'll wake up to them every morning and press my face against them and pretend there's not all this time and space between us. all my friends and family are going to be in the midwest. i've never been 3 time zones away from them for longer than a month before. this shit's bananas.)

love and faces,
stephanie