eleven uow eleven eleven an hour passes 040803 ... silentbob 11 deadly sins 040803 ... cr0wl we all have our interpretation. i can do better than that! 090926 ... tender_square we packed up the u-haul brandon drove in from ann arbor to my sister’s place. we probably didn’t need such a large truck; my items barely took up a third of the space. after the bedbug fiasco in my apartment, i rented candi’s spare room, not knowing when i’d get the call from immigration that my paperwork had been approved. i didn’t have any furniture to move the day of, just boxes of cds and books and records that had been packed away from six months prior, my clothes, my bicycle. candi didn’t even see me off that morning. brandon and i drove to burger king on dougall and got greasy croissanwiches we went inside to order because he wasn’t confident he could maneuver the truck in the drive-thru lane. in the last photo snapped of my life in windsor i am beaming and waving at the camera in my black puffer vest and beanie as i stand in front of the truck, the sun shining behind me. i can still see the image in my mind even after losing_the_data on my external hard drive, where the picture had been kept. we took the ambassador bridge but got confused about whether we should go through the car booths or the tractor trailer ones; we chose the latter and the border guards didn’t know how to process my visa. the whole thing set us back about an hour. after, my passport had a stapled sheet with a stamp that said i’d been approved to live in the us. that was eleven years ago today. when i called my father in september of 2014 to tell him i was leaving brandon, he assumed that the dissolution of my marriage meant that i was coming back to live in windsor. “what will you do for work? where will you live?” he was worried for me. he didn’t anticipate that i’d stay in the us given the changing circumstances. “ann arbor is my home now,” i told him. “i’m keeping my job. i’m living in the house for now but i’m looking for a new place to rent.” i didn't tell him about michael in that conversation, one bombshell seemed enough for that day. it’s been seven years since i left brandon and as much as i convinced myself that i’ve worked through it, there are parts of me that remain heartbroken still, there are issues being brought to the fore again in this new cycle of my life that i’m revisiting from new angles. and i’m thinking back to that conversation with my dad all those years ago. maybe he was on to something; maybe windsor is the exact place i need to return to in order to heal. 211113 what's it to you? who go blather from