"somewhere other than inside the out there." -- part twenty.

it was a beautiful day here, today. the sun was warm and pushing, open windows and gatherings on our porch. there was a long wind, and branches moving. i have even less faith on days like today.

december 2000, it was a cold of a winter as we got in boston. winter lasts twice as long up in a place like that, and now, i'm living february in t-shirt weather.

we couldn't stand another farewell at an airport, and we split up the holidays among our families. his mom got thanksgiving and our birthdays. my parents got christmas. his dad got new year's.

our families were finally able to get to know us as together.

light a cigarette.

there really is a beat up, rusted timeline that i'm working from here. like everything else in my head, it's tattered from too much or too little use. sometimes, it's hard to follow.

my senior year was stressed and full, between writing classes and my lit minor and my nearly full time job. it was necessary to take time off to relish in the fact that my family puts on an amazing christmas.

we, as a family, were never into the whole like midnight mass or catholic hooplah that fell into the season. however, we rejoiced in christmas as a family holiday, an unfettered time to spend with each other. yes, every year, we damn near killed each other, but we always had a good time.

i was raised as irish catholic as my mother could make possible. but, i was lucky, because my parents gave me the right to make my own decision as far as religion goes from the very beginning. us kids went to church on and off, but we made it into a variety show. through middle school and high school, i attended several different types of churches. i suppose you could say that i was raised irish catholic without the church. it was more of a way of life for us. family always came first. dinner was at the same time every night with all five of us, meat and potatoes. there was a strict discipline and overprotective vibe in our household that we all pretty much accepted as not only necessary but right (until each of us individually reached that angsty age of irrational behavior). beds were made. chores were done. guilt was inherent. school grades were high. in true irish catholic discipline, we didn't get grounded ... we got lectures. man, my dad could talk us into a hole that would take weeks for a team of fire fighters to rescue us from. whoever was in trouble had to sit and listen to our dad get angrier and angrier, lecturing on the necessities of being a good person and acting upon that which you thought was right. then, an hour or five later, he would talk himself back down, just shake his head and ask what you thought you were doing, were you actually thinking when you made this rash action? his arguments were always logical and categorized, completely thought out and impenetrable to youth.

neither here nor there.

christmas was the excuse for immense meals, glad shopping, and tickets home for everyone.

boy and i pack our bags and hopped on the commuter rail, kicking snow at each other and happy for a few rare days off.

strange that now, my family has families of their own creation, and me, the youngest, i still go home every year to hopefully find the people i know come first.

anyway, christmas morning, we opened presents and sat with our tea and coffee. christmas eve had been spent warm in front of the fire, boy and i grasping each other and telling stories.

my brothers shook his hand and skeptically let him in to our tiny traditions of the dinner table, of the christmas light tour, of three in the morning bad movie time.

it was obvious to them that he was it, and i wouldn't let them push me around on this one. beyond that, they loved him. all my brothers wanted was a boy to treat me right, and i can't blame them for that.

my extended family met him, my aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins. my cousin, amazing soul that she is, was into palm reading. she had learned this middle school trick of telling how many kids you were going to have by some lines on the side of your hand. she told both boy and myself that we were to have three boys. she smiled at me and told me later that she really liked my boyfriend. my uncle gave him shit for being short, and boy gave him shit right back for being bald. "he's a keeper, fights back," and my uncle laughed, proud that i had found someone who could hold his own.

we took amazing amounts of leftovers back to boston, being the poor, uncooking college students that we were. everyone took pity on us and gave us food to last us for months.

back in boston, we both went back to work for a couple of days before heading down to new orleans.

his father greated us at the airport with a normal smirk on his lips and happiness to see his boy down from the dark northeast.

since my senior year started, i had been looking into graduate schools, scared that if i took a year off, i would never go back. mainly, i'd been looking in chicago, eager to try a new city.

we were both disturbed by this. i didn't really want to go to school, to leave him, to go on without having him near. he didn't want me to leave, or give up opportunities, or go on without me. i realized pretty quickly that i really didn't want to pursue a masters in screenwriting, considering that i already knew the form and the distinguishing attributes of the art so well. i'd studied it for four years, how much more did i really want to learn? i came to a point where i didn't know where the hell i wanted to be or what i wanted to do with the rest of my life. i looked into schools in hollywood, but the romance of that lifestyle escaped me.

eventually, without really caring, i let the deadlines slip by and decided to take a year off after school. boy just smiled.

we had begun to talk about where we would go and how we would live. things seemed more open to us, or we were more open to them.

in new orleans, his stepmom and his dad fed us well and took us out and about.

boy and i took the streetcar to the zoo, and since it was chilly that day, we were the only ones there. used to the cold, we walked around slowly and watched the otters for quite some time. he said they liked me. the monkeys were holed away, and an hour passed as we perused the reptile house. quiet and alone, the tiny lizards and frogs and the grandpa albino crocidile were out and about doing their reptile things. we read about poisonous snakes and tried to find the tree frogs. not one other person passed us.

when the zoo was closing, we headed back over to the streetcar. for some reason, we waited for an hour and a half for that damn trolley. we made up stories about all the people we saw. we sat and had grass fights. we talked about how much we liked it in this city with its slow life and rotund people.

at this point, we had been trying to decide what we were going to do once i graduated. boston was too expensive for me to support myself right out of college, and he hated boston university. we wanted to move somewhere warmer, on our own. we talked about getting married when he finished school, and we talked about whether it was a good idea to get an apartment by ourselves.

the streetcar mumbled and clanked its way up st. charles.

new year's, his dad and his stepmom took us to a slow bar. i think it had an australian theme or kangaroo in the name of it or something like that.

either way, we were four of the ten people total in the bar. just the way boy and i liked it. we weren't crowd people. the four of us went upstairs where boy and his dad played pool, and we bogarted the jukebox. around midnight, we leaned on the railing of the balcony type second floor and watched the people below celebrate each other and a new time. boy took my hand, kissed me passionately, and said, "it's all ours."

before they took us out to dinner one night, his dad lit the menorah and said the hannukah prayers. boy did the same on one of the other nights. i don't know why, but it set my heart on fire to hear words like that come out of his mouth. to be a part of something so true. and we all killed some time laughing and telling stories as we waited for the candles.

unexpectedly, we both received hannukah gelt, a sushi set and some fantabulous bronze monkey. brilliant. for a christmas gift, they took me to the french quarter for a psychic tarot reading. how did these people know me so well? how could they have possibly picked such beautiful things for me? i felt light and loved.

on the plane back to boston, i put my head on his shoulder and fell into a deep sleep. he read a book that his dad had gotten him and held my hand.

2001 had begun, and we had this year for our very own.

oh, while we were in new orleans, our roommate of the time had called us.

"dude, um, someone robbed us!"

"what?"

"yeah, they took my goddamn rent money from the box on my window sill."

jesus. a couple days later, we received another call: "holy shit, they went through your stuff this time. i don't know what's missing, but lindsay's room is a mess. the detectives want to talk to you, so i told them when you'd be back. man, i'm sleeping on the couch with a knife. this is messed up."

boy and i could do nothing but look at each other. but on that plane ride, it all seemed so far away.

when we got back to the apartment, splurging on a cab, i went into my room that had been torn apart.

things we didn't understand: how they got in, why they took our the change out of our change jars and not the brand new playstation2, why they stole our roommate's bag'o'porn and didn't touch our immense cd collection, how they got in again, why they took my grandmother's ring but left all of my other jewelry.

i was heartbroken. i never really knew my grandmother, except in dreams and through stories that my mom told me. but she had given my mom a topaz ring that had become mine when i turned eighteen. it was one of the only things that i had to connect me to this part of my family that was lost before i had it.

they had taken the discman i had gotten him for his birthday, but he was more pissed about the at the drive-in cd that was in it.

the detective (detective mahoney ... no seriously) took boy's darth vader mug in to fingerprint and deduced that they had bent the bars on our windows to squeeze in. "just some kids."

we checked pawn shops for my ring, but we had run out of luck by that time.

i wrote a letter to the realty company, but they didn't really care that the security bars were just those thin rods they use to reinforce concrete and that our windows didn't lock. nothing came from our complaints. nothing ever did.

we fashioned diy locks by ramming pieces of wood behind the window so you couldn't slide it open.

we shrugged.

january came and finished quickly, a bad lay at the beginning of the year.

i didn't have to think, everything came by old habit without any glory.

we were falling more deeply into each other. we couldn't afford to replace anything we had, so we were careful with the truth that we possessed.

he skittered off to louisville for a bit, and i was surprised to miss him so ravenously. i just waited for something more to happen.

classes were long and narrow, claustrophobic. my long ride to campus on the t was littered with bumps and elbows in the ribs as the flood of students returned.

by february, we decided.

"it'll be wonderful, won't it, baby? tell me it'll be wonderful."

"it'll be wonderful."

"you think?" he asked as he blinked. it was dark, but i could nearly hear his blink as he always did when he asked a question to which he already knew the answer.

"i know," and i smiled to the ceiling, not wanting to go to sleep, "we'll be happy again."

light a cigarette.

a couple months later, we were back on a plane to new orleans to look for apartments.

there was little luck the first day and a half as his dad mapped out the neighborhoods we should be looking at.

my head was reeling with all of the work i had to do when i got back. graduation was a little over a month away, and before that, i had a screening and about seven papers due and a feature length screenplay ... or something along those lines. it was just a lot.

boy was doing remarkably well, the type of well when we had made a decision and we were actually acting on it.

we were going to move to new orleans in august, it was all for us.