Restless Soul Syndrome.

In elementary school, my aunt gave my family a couch. A detail so commonplace, a staple of the nuclear family even, may sound strange, but for me and my brother Colin this was a big deal. The couch was small, but it was nice, and a welcome step in the direction of a normal childhood. I say that because I'm certain we were the only children in New England who spent just about all of boyhood watching PBS on a seventies-era television, all the while living in a house completely devoid of leisure furniture.

The cream-colored upholstery, a bastion of what seemed right and good in the universe, was eventually ripped apart by our floppy-eared house destroyer, Zeke. We walked into the living room and saw that he, bored with the contents in his food bowl, chose to dine on the sofa. The tattered remains ended up on the sidewalk and my parents never bought another. The couch incident marked the beginning of my fickle relationship with household furnishings.

Though they didn't replace the sofa, they eventually upgraded to cable channels and a TV manufactured in the current decade. This increased my participation in conversations with peers about popular TV shows, where before I would nod in feigned interest and hope they didn't ask my opinion on the best South Park character.

In college, the powers that were provided the standard-issue undergraduate effects: a wooden desk, a wooden chair, and my very first twin bed. I stretched out in giddy excitement, as my new mattress was longer and more agreeable to my back, a refreshing change from the undersized rectangle I had slept on since elementary school. But just as my affection grew and my larger, shoulderier college frame molded to the material, it was gone. A new semester meant a new bed, and I couldn't do a thing about it.

A bit later, I graduated. I walked across the stage, sweaty and nervous, and received my diploma, bidding farewell to my friends, my teachers, and my twin beds. It was time to grow up, and I moved home for the summer to impatiently look for my first real job, once more sleeping on a mattress uncomfortable even by prison standards.


In August of that first summer, I relocated to Massachusetts and took a job to live and work at an independent boarding school. The School classified me as an Intern, a title that comes with about as much authority as a telemarketer. My salary was comically small, but I got by mainly because of rent free living and scarfing as many meals as I could tolerate out of the warmed buffet trays in the school dining room.

Administrators opened the door to the musty apartment on campus and the stale summer air trapped inside misted my body. I scanned the barren, tiny flat. It looked not unlike something purchased in the toy department of Kmart. Something easily assembled, with the front of the box reading "My First Apartment" in glossy, multi-colored sidewalk chalk. I walked through and saw what remained from its previous owner: a full-sized futon bed, a galley kitchen, and a washer-dryer from, I presume, the Nixon administration. That first night I ate a sandwich on a cardboard box, a newly graduated grown-up at his new grown-up job, and wondered with the angst of a college freshman far away from home how I would fill the empty space.


In time, other families living at the school donated to my penniless cause and I acquired a TV, a flower-print two-seater couch, a blue velvet easy chair, and a folding table on which I'd eat the few meals I could barely cook.

I came to realize that in Adulthood these inanimate objects are the barometer of staying-power: the well-worn Sunday football La-Z-Boy, Uncle Joe's coma-inducing barcalounger, the chaise lounge from your parents' basement, faintly splattered with decades-old toddler vomit. Grown-ups are the ones who venture into the Scandinavian abyss of Ikea to drop four hundred dollars on the perfect bed set and living room layout because they are investing time in a particular place. Spending that kind of money isn't typically for teaching interns or people whose inconstant job status has pulled them to three different addresses in three years.

The hand-me-down apartment wasn't much, but I lived there without duress until the end of the school year. I moved back to New Hampshire in July, leaving everything behind but my clothes and the odds and ends I collected over the year. Once again in the throes of the Job Hunt and very much befuddled by the unforeseeable next step.

Another tense summer came and went. I cold-called and emailed resumes and hit refresh on job search websites.

Nothing.

But like any good Pavlovian dog, I hurriedly packed my car after a phone call from the School and spent the next two years as a government-supported substitute teacher in the burbs.

*

Two years now seems like ten. Or thirty.
I survey the miscellaneous and quantify the essentials on the carpeted floor in my almost empty room. The previously filled space looks bare, skeletal. The chipping white paint glares at me. The posters, picture frames and Irish flag that covered them long packed away.

Twenty-four years old without a job.
What a cliché.

I stood there looking at my valuables, deciding what parts of my life would be shoved into vacuum seal bags and strategically positioned into luggage.

Goose-stepping around the room I realize, almost painfully so, how little Stuff I own. Days away from the most significant, spontaneous, and perhaps foolish decision in my relatively short life and all I've got and, I guess, all I need lay there in front of me. It made moving to California seem not so much moving, but carrying my things from one place to another.

It was a peculiar few days, and I wondered how I got to that point. The Five Year Plan I envisioned after college never came to fruition. The one with job security. Where I'd get a new car, and purchase a variety of groceries on a regular basis to hone my cooking skills. I'd open another savings account, put money away for who-knows-what down the road. I'd play in a summer softball league and go out for beers afterward with my new friends. And there would be steady, albeit woeful, student loan payments.

But now as I sit in the almost empty room, at what is soon to be another former address, that all seems like chintzy over-ambition, some sort of dream. An ideal where all the elements were somehow weighed incorrectly, insufficiently.


San Francisco is the answer to the discussion in my subconscious. The soul became restless. And I decided to leave on a hunch. A hunch that the school I was a part-time insert-a-job at would turn into another fiasco with more hoops to jump through, disingenuous smiles to flash, and scripted answers to deliver. "Go ahead and submit a resume," the Talking Heads said, even though a majority of the bullet points happened under their gaze.

It was a gut feeling I wasn't as happy as I thought. A notion I should get my head in a different space for a while. Perhaps somewhere people are more easygoing, likely because they aren't packed in many inches of snow for months on end.

In lifeguarding the term is Active Drowning: the state in which the individual is struggling at the surface of the water, where the end is imminent unless immediate action is taken. The legs flail below, churning the water as the arms slap at the dark blue in any attempt to survive. The heart thumps against the chest. And before long, the tensed limbs grow heavy and the surging adrenaline wears thin. The mind surrenders to the exhaustion. The arms and legs cease thrashing. And the weight pulls the body below the waterline.

And that's where I was. Looking an escape before it was too late. Before the inevitable.

A month or so prior to my departure, I struggled to find the words to make sense of moving to a new city three thousand miles away. Where I'd be without a job, have only a few friends, a tenuous idea where I would live, and an even slimmer grasp on whatever it is I would do next.

And like some sophomoric, esoteric-wannabe, I voiced my complaint to a good writer who doubles as a good friend.

He paused, as he often does, and smirked.

Why don't you leave first, he said.


So I did.

[Photo: Marin Mccarthy]