Equilibrium

I left America yesterday, but I could not tell you when.
Half a bag of pumpkin seeds,
one car, two airplanes, and three buses later,
hollow and husked,
a shell of myself,
I came back to my new flat—
which has two new flatmates,
men I scarcely know,
and a hell of a lot of dirt.

I was unhappy and my
feet were cold. I inadvertently missed
the official induction meeting
of my school this morning, and
deliberately missed the social gathering
this evening, being in no mood for
making new friends while still mourning
leaving old ones.

I gnawed on bread, fretted over my
laptop, which doesn’t travel well,
and finally set forth to the grocery store,
the one I used to go to, far from my flat,
but with familiar shelves and cannisters.
En route, I found Michael examining a traffic cone by the library.

Michael and I have a strange friendship.
He’s in his last stage of writing up his PhD,
one of those phantom people who flit in and out
of their offices at terrifying hours.
We have never done anything social together;
yet he has walked around the corner
of various streets just when I needed someone most.
This past year he helped me process
the death of my grandmother,
the stress of undergoing an HIV test,
(yah, long long story involving my foot and a hypodermic needle on a beach
in Cambodia—a story that no longer matters, praise be),
and the decision to apply for a PhD.

Michael was delighted to see me.
Michael is always delighted to see me,
which is part of the reason Michael is
a glorious friend. We processed whether
or not I can pass my transition boards on
an accelerated schedule in order to go on
holiday in May. We decided that I could,
and I proceeded on to the store. It was full
of confused new undergraduates, and I had
the singular pleasure of being able to feel
myself past those early interminable searches
for the cherry tomatoes and the free range eggs.
I know where things belong; I’m not new anymore.

Then I walked home in the late afternoon sun,
and cooked pasta with mussels, which are such
fearsome looking creatures that they cheered me up,
and two of my other guy friends from the Centre for African
Studies texted me about going to a movie together—to be honest,
I don’t think they realized I had gone anywhere, and I felt
inside my chest that slow shift of the heart
back to some strange sort of equilibrium.