For reasons passing my understanding, every time I walk past a mirrored surface I stop and have this moment of “God damn I look good.” My hair is weirdly cooperative. My skin looks lovely. I appreciate my current figure very much.

I date girls who look like this. Or I did. My ex and I looked a lot a like only I thought she was prettier than me.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a streak of vanity immediately post-birth before. It’s weird.

I’m finding out that I don’t remember shit very well. Sarah is rereading my archive (for what, the fifth? sixth time?) and she is amused as she corrects my recollections of how I felt in the past.

I feel so very known. Thank you for pointing out how my memory drifts. She says I was a lot more ok with two and done after Middle Child.

I can’t remember that. I can only remember the years of crying as I bled every month. This is why I write shit down. No one is actually dependent on my shoddy memory. I wrote down whatever I was feeling in the moment. And when I misremember and someone says, “Actually what you wrote was…” I don’t argue and I feel melty inside.

Thank you for insisting on consistency. It’s part of how I know you love me. You want me to tell the same story. You don’t want me reinventing the past. The story is what it is.

Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for wanting to. Thank you for being my friend.

I think a lot about friendship and what it means. I’m feeling a little worried/guilty about T&t, friends who are a big deal in my life. T in particular is having big feelings about us wanting to move. It’s going to be a major loss in his life. We are very good friends and he spends more time with me getting emotional support than he does with anyone else. When I leave it is going to create a giant cavernous hole in his life and he’s feeling anxious. We’ve been hanging out a lot for about 12 years. It will hurt to lose that contact.

But I need to go. My family wants to go.

It’s not because there is no one in the bay we love. We love a lot of people and we have been carried by your beautiful friendship for so many years.

My neighborhood is changing and the new people have no interest in the structure I helped create in the past ten years. The people we built relationships with are moving or dying. My friends are flung all over the bay area and the driving to maintain relationships hurts my body. I can’t keep up with a bay area lifestyle. I can’t drive to San Jose and Oakland and Palo Alto every week for socializing. It hurts. Being isolated in this little town while our friends are always 20-90 minutes away… that’s hard on us.

We’d like to move somewhere smaller. Somewhere less spread out. We won’t have as many friends. We won’t have the history.

I am eager to find out what it is like to walk into a room and not run into people I’ve known for decades. The expectations people have of me, for good or for ill, are hard to carry. I was a professional new kid for so long that being as established as I am is hard.

The kids and I are already talking about the stuff we don’t want to pack and we just want to pass it on. It is kind of weird to me how much the kids want to go. They both seem to feel like they don’t really want to go through puberty and their teenager years here. I’m not sure I understand their motivation, but they want to move. Noah is happy about the idea of getting out of a metropolis but otherwise he isn’t as motivated to leave. He’s a lot more content with hiding in his house full time to deal with his unhappiness with the area changing.

And that’s all the typing I can do in this horrible position.