goodbye.

The day has come, I’ve decided. I’m sorry.

You sprawl there, stripped and defenseless, lying in anxious angularity on the floor of the room that we are currently renting just for you. Although you try, like a faithful dog awaiting its next walk, to stay in the corner and out of the way, you cover half of the floorboards in your luxuriant vastness. You beckon to me, your faint polyester sheen and garden of imaginary flowers combining with the sinewy lines of your seams to put me into a somnolent trance. I resist. I look away, at the rest of the room, the room we pay hundreds for each month and which is supposed to serve as our writing room, studio, something, anything but a repository for unused things which we cannot bear to part with. When I walk through here, I always feel guilty. Am I too busy for a little nap? Couldn’t I just bring my book in here, sprawl out and read a chapter or two, my propped elbows perfectly supported, my feet nowhere near the edge?

I can’t. I don’t have the time, I don’t live in here. I tried to sleep in here a few nights, when my lover was sick, but the highway noise too easily invades this room. Still, after I’d rumpled those bedclothes a bit, you were all the more appealing to me in the days that followed. The memory foam my lover brought here, the one in the other room, seems so impersonal in its luxury, in its ease. You have a a few springs close to the surface, but of course I could always slide over to another part of you, cool and inviting and smooth. I know you intimately, where your hills and valleys are, and those knobby parts, and the softer ones that I’ve created with the knobby parts of myself.

We’ve hosted a few people, you and I, and each one of them has been impressed by you, by your size and your gentle support. Although you’d be there with us, you gave us all the room we wanted. And when I’d go elsewhere for a night or a few, myself the third part of a trio, you’d be there waiting for me, low to the ground, smelling of us, ready to soothe the aches I’d gained from straying.

But the time has come. You and I have outlasted many of my partnerships, but I cannot keep you here, ignoring you night after night, half-wishing I could put a desk where you are, give my books a place to rest and my hands a place to work. Were I to do nothing, you would wait there forever.

So I’m going to do what I should have done months ago. I’m going to see if I can find someone else who will appreciate you as I have, and who has space for all that you have to give. I hope you understand.

Hope

It's election day and I can hardly stand it. I've been working sporadically, and even that has taken an inordinate amount of concentration. I've been wandering around the internet, but there's so much coverage that I am quickly overwhelmed. I tried to waste some time getting the house in order for the new era that will begin tomorrow (whether it be an era of change, or one in which we reach new lows of dejection and pessimism, I'd like for the place to start out organized). But then I felt I should be writing about this undeniably historic moment. And now I find myself with too much to say, and too little to say, all at once, and the words for this state of anticipation are eluding me.
I've gone from someone thoroughly cynical about the political process to someone who nearly swoons at the thought of Obama as president. Imagine, a president that we can not only respect, but who we can actually get behind? Someone who we will support and cheer on, someone who seems to have something to do with us. And by "we" here I mean not only my like-minded fellow very-liberals, but decent, moderate people who would be characterized by the evangelists and billionaires who have taken over in recent years as liberal, too. Because that's another part of what makes the possibility of an Obama win so exciting - that it might present some chance for a wider section of society to be represented, and, thereby, for some actual social change to occur.
I'm not under any illusions about everything being fixed this year if Obama wins, or even this term. But as someone who's spent her entire adult life with W as president, I'm pretty damn excited about the change that so many are hoping for.