Walls

I knew it would be several days until I was able to return to this, but it's been an eventful several days. Last week was hasty; I finished my job, packed the remaining strewn items in our near-empty Vinings apartment, hurried to Douglasville (if one can do such a thing driving southbound on 285 and westbound on 20) and attended a little adios dinner with the B's and R's. AB gave me this incredible travel cooler complete with various items (all which were listed on a print out that she had composed) to accompany my travels to Richmond. And the R's paid for my steak and beers. I stayed at the R's so that I did not have to return to the shell of an apartment and sleep restlessly on the floor the night before my drive. Then Thursday Craig did not work, rather, the movers arrived in Richmond with Our Things. And I launched into my 9 or 10 hour drive to Richmond from Atlanta. Driving such a distance solo is excruciating. I mean, there are worse things, but certainly driving alone through several states doesn't rank high in my book of Good Things. Nevertheless, after battling out of the city for an hour, several followed hours of lonesome cruising, a brief lunch with old friends in Charlotte, NC, and a continued second leg of a handful of hours, I rolled into Richmond. When I shut off the car and met Craig in the parking lot of our new building, I felt like collapsing into a heap of exhaustion, but Craig's nice smiling greeting lifted me and I felt further motivated to climb the enclosed stairwell to our new apartment. I couldn't contain my relief and excitement...relief that our place was as completely incredible as we remembered it to be, and excitement that our place was as completely incredible as we remembered it to be! I'm still, almost a week later, in disbelief that this is our apartment. I love it (and I know Craig does, also). Anyway, I'm not overly talkative because our days at work (my old job now new job...the company was extremely gracious to take me back after my year with someone else in Atlanta...) are longer made by the sheer fact that it's dark when we leave (we've been riding together...snow has fallen! Craig takes care of me...) and it's dark when we return home. It's the same for everyone who works a normal day during the winter: draining, work fills the whole day. But I did want to record a very classic few moments, moments which lack conclusion, between Craig and me that will live long beyond our stay in this apartment. I've already explained the background of this building. It contains certain levels of nervous energy for us, despite how well we like it (love it). Anyway, our first night we were so tired we slept like rocks. But our second night, after I spent an entire day pawing through 4 feet tall kitchen boxes overstuffed with stiff brown paper wrapped around each individual glass, bowl and spoon, and Craig worked, we went to bed kind of early. At 2.36 or thereabouts, a curiously loud crash woke me from sleep and I froze in stunned fearful silence. Did you hear that? I said out loud, unsure whether the sound had awoken him as well, and with zero delay, and filled with pending doom, Craig replied, Yeah, what was that? Neither of us felt eager to creep down our very long apartment hallway to find the origin of that sound. Actually, we have yet to determine the cause, but I did learn the next day during our shopping spree in Short Pump that Craig had envisioned a masked gentleman stumbling from door to door (our apartment is lined by a hallway filled with various doors leading to rooms, closets, a guest bathroom, and so on) and, in Craig's imagination, because of the number of doors the masked man would encounter before getting to us, we would have just enough time to push a dresser in front of our bedroom door to protect ourselves from the intruder. Thank goodness we have a large dresser sitting by our bedroom door, I say! Anyway, we're looking forward to a happy (and safe) stay here in Richmond. We will look out for each other. Besides, who wouldn't want to spend any number of months hanging around in this den of sophistication? It's not perfect, but it's certainly getting there.