When I left Louisville in early August this year it was a whirlwind affair. After 8 years, Louisville had become the first city that felt like my home. My siblings have established careers there, my mother and grandmother live and care for eachother there, my father and his family live only an hour away and I have more genuine friends, mentors and supporters living in Derby City than I can count. And so a new career in Lincoln Nebraska posed as much an opportunity for turmoil as happiness.
With some help from my family and friends, I made the accumulated material, emotional and lawful presence of a life in Kentucky mobile enough to re-emerge hundreds of miles west of my home. And I went alone.
The morning that I packed up everything the movers would not and a week's worth of bare necessities from my apartment on Clay Street I left an altarpiece against the frequently graffitied flood wall about 100 feet outside my front door.
I had collected wood shaped like parts of a skeleton for the past 3 years while I was in grad school. My ultimate intention was to create a human marrionette, attached to this mysterious backdrop covered in the text of a language I'd created. Although I never found all of my bones, I had the semblance of a human skeleton well in place, so with no room or way to take these things with me, I laid them against the floodwall, the canvas of the adolescent rebels in the skate park a block towards the interstate from me. I left myself a little grave in Louisville, KY, for the life I had created in the past 8 years, but which, like all things I finally had to let go.
I have a new life in Nebraska, now and I will have many more new lives in the future. I hope one day, I get another chapter in Louisville, but it will be a new life as well. And while I look back with fond memories, I try to remember that the only life I could have there in the future will be a new one.
