I'm not dead! I'm in the last month of nursing school. I haven't had much time or energy to write. I'm utterly exhausted, a bit demoralized, and so, so close to a new chapter in my life.
I think I'm at the point I was at when I left Seattle--of looking at my life and thinking there's nothing at all wrong with it, except that I can't see this being my only life. I want to reincarnate. There's so much stuff out there to experience, and I have the freedom and opportunity to go out and experience some more, and I intend to.
I've been going through my grandfather's slides lately. My grandmother died a few months ago, and I took the slides from her house. My grandfather loved to travel, and I'm not sure I fully understood that until I started going through these slides. There's wild leopards in them, and thousand-year-old synagogues, and million-year-old glaciers, and a stunning variety of things that look like penises. Just pages and pages of rock penises and wood penises and gourd penises, interspersed with all the glories of the Earth. I love my grandfather now more than ever. I want to travel as widely as him, to live as fully as he did, and to see as many penises.
And so I'm going to leave Boston. I don't yet know when or for where. I still love Rowdy dearly and the idea of leaving him breaks my heart--but I also know he doesn't want me to stay here just for him, and deep down neither do I. I'll visit often and I'll email and I'll always love him. But I may move away from him.
Anyway. Wherever I go, Fifty Shades of Grey will still be with me. Unfortunately.
Content warnings for this chapter: Stalking, mostly. Physical and emotional abuse, although the physical is not quite so intense as in some other chapters. And one sketchy-ass gynecologist.
