Home – UnleashTheDuff

I’m exhausted. Much of my own doing – I’m just having too much fun not sleeping and putting this new apartment together. But mostly owing to the fact that for the entire month of May I’ve been passenger to a (get ready for some cringe) rollercoaster of emotions that finds increasingly large zeniths and nadirs to catapult me through. I arrived here, in my new home (more on that later), just a week ago, having said so many goodbyes so fraught with emotion I was basically shaking the last 24 hours in Minnesota. I belabored this point just two weeks ago, suffice to say the interim fortnight has wrought a seemingly impossible increased intensity of emotions so exhausting that today I fell asleep trying to put command hooks on a poster board. For 20 minutes I was stuck in limbo waiting for Leo to kick my comatose ass out of a chair to kill me back to life. Thankfully, I’m here to write about it, but not before I had to wipe the drool off my face.

I was legit sobbing and shaking while giving a farewell after this workout. I was only about 24 hours before hitting the road for Tacoma. I was in between sprinting and sobbing on my way to this workout, one of the faster 8 mile runs I’ve had that early in the morning in a long time. The rain and clouds would not deter me from being on time for this farewell exercise. I have to shout-IN the truest of friend-finders, whose courage is (as I’ve alluded to previously) infinitely inspiring. There are few people with enough of that courage to withstand embracing a sweaty Ryan Duff long enough even just for a photo. Hopefully when you make your last NP workout in Minneapolis you can muster enough composure to not shake and cry violently during it.

That’s an intensity of sleep I’m gifted only in my most severe states of exhaustion. Sleep I haven’t got probably since my days in college where the precious few hours between school and labor necessitated immediate REM. An intensity evinced by multiple nights of falling through my front door after a Chipotle shift and having the next conscious experience be an alarm telling me its time to do yesterday, again. And again. And again. Though the exhaustion I feel now is equally intense, it’s genesis couldn’t be more disparate. The fumes from spent happiness and laboring to fill a 1200 square foot space from scratch have proliferated my apartment, luring me into new projects and enchanting me with ideas I’m just too excited to sleep on. Though too creatively inept to fully realize…it’s a work in progress.

I’m fortunate to be near(ish) to another NP chapter in Seattle. Through I’ve quickly realized just how fucking terrible the traffic on I-5 is. It was a 4 hour excursion yesterday to pick up a chair that I purchased on OfferUp that was supposed to be an hour and a half round-trip. This was the first, and unfortunately the last I’m sure for a while, of being able to hit up NP. But customary to the radically inclusive nature of this group, my first non-MSP workout was welcomed with sweaty hugs, coffee, and conversation – the perfect elixir for early morning bliss.

I’m at a fortunate point in my life where my home can emulate a true living space in a way I’ve never experienced before. I have space (LOTS OF SPACE MY LORD), both physical and financial, to curate something aesthetically pleasing, functionally sound, and can accommodate (and will accommodate) the company of others. Though with intern year starting in one month (One. Month. From. To-fucking-morrow), how much time I’ll have to enjoy the space will be limited. But perhaps that makes having it be comfortable, in every way, that much more important. Or maybe I’m just saying that to justify dispensing more of my income on it. Who knows? I’m not sure I care either way.

Would you believe it, I still to this day have that damn tiara and banner hanging in my closet. I had never had a birthday party before, and with so many of my friends there to celebrate, it felt natural as ever to proclaim my VIP status at this, a shitty dive-bar in NE Minneapolis.

This new home of mine is important. For many reasons. Firstly, well, it represents a lot of “firsts.” It’s my first home ever not within the confines of that troubled-but-sometimes-beautiful-though-desperately-fucking-cold place that is Minnesota. It’s the first time I’ve moved to a place where nobody knows my name (but you want to go there anyway 😀 ) And it’s the home I’ll start my first foray into medicine as an actual doctor. There is a lot of sentimentality already baked into the walls of this place, as the inverse of so many new adventures definitionally requires the end of so many others. I said goodbye to all of my classmates, many of whom I’ll never see again as they progress through their careers as physicians all over the country. A smaller group of whom I’ll be friends with forever – however geographically separated. I said goodbye to a running community at Mill City and November Project MSP – two farewells that eviscerated me emotionally and I’m still recovering. I said goodbye to a school that, 10 years ago, after being waitlisted for months (I honestly didn’t even really want to go to college – go figure), decided to admit me. And admit me again 6 years later (fool me once, shame on…you know the rest. Unless your Bush).

I am vegan. Y’all probably knew that. So you may be surprised, with all of the vegan options in MSP, that my absolute, 100% favorite restaurant – EVER – is a shop called Tori Ramen in Saint Paul. If I had a last supper it would be here. The owners are amazing. Shout-out to Robyn for providing Mollie and I the greatest farewell, 4 course dinner I could envision the night before our departure. For 2 years the highlight of my week was coming in to study (less) and eat (more) in your restaurant. You’re right – you’re as much of a component to my academic success as everyone else whose given me warm food and wonderful friendship. Even when it was me stubbornly eating your food in my car because it just didn’t taste the same outside of that handcrafted bowl.

Overall, I’ve learned that there are few constants in the process of trading one home for another. And that I’m particularly emotionally labile as the departure day nears. Like, ugly crying kind of sadness. But unique to my departure was the immutable precense of one soul who joined me at both ends of the journey and all throughout it. It is beyond me why anyone would choose to spend a week sitting, sleeping, eating, laughing, laboring, dancing, and singing next to me in a 4-door car as we drove across the country (and a complete enigma to me how it’s happened to me twice). But my oldest friend in this world assured she’d be there – sending me off from one home and employing her wealth of knowledge (and her patience with my ineptitude in home-building) to help create my next. We haven’t shared a zip-code in a decade, but I’ve never felt anything but at home with her in those precious fleeting reunions we’ve shared since. Reflecting on it now, it seems cosmically perfect we’d share the transition to my new home together. Who better to share this journey with then the person who gave me a home for an entire month on the floor of a studio apartment smaller than my new bedroom so we could travel California, and the world, together? The same person who would fly to Minnesota, in the middle of winter, just to see a concert with me. And do it again two years later. The same person who showed up for my surprise birthday party…3 months before my birthday. And would surprise me again to commemorate earning my medical degree. The same person who introduced me to the West Coast and all it has to offer, and through each adventure being an interminable source of laughter and conversation I never wanted to end.

It was either immediately before or after this lovely photo was taken that I legitimately broke my rib on this damn paddleboard. I had secured just enough confidence in that windy lagoon to try my hand at racing Mollie backward back to the shore. I made it maybe 4 seconds when I postured a legitimately Acme-like flail before barreling my left chest squarely onto that board that I fucking swear transformed into concrete during my descent. I scrambled back onto the board as quickly as possible, not to save face but the water was a balmy 55 degrees. Mollie saw the entire thing. Although I was genuinely laughing with her, it wasn’t until I moved in just the right manner back at her apartment a few hours later that my rib audibly cracked and for the next 2 weeks I’d find a way to tweak it to send me into a pain spiral. 12/10 would do it again.

There’s nothing I don’t rely on her for. She’s my closest confidant. This trip alone she saved us from waking up in bed-bugs (the Econo lodge in Montana is a no-go FYI) and saved both of our lives when she alerted my attention to the road and I semi-narrowly avoided rear-ending, well, a semi. Two, actually. Good for advice, for adventure, for laughter, for tolerating my BO wearing the same clothes for 4 days. Wherever we go together, I feel at home. Maybe I’m a little less naked. But definitely same amount of farting, and BO, no doubt.

Although in one dimension, my home is an entirely new place, with new walls, (future) new friends, new stories to be made, new knowledge to be learned, my most beloved home endures, and I grow fonder of that place every day. Not a home with walls, and a ceiling, but a home with a heart, and love. Even though that home is 1000 miles away, the distance seems to shrink when I need it most (or damnit just when I want to have the best week of my life!). And although I’ll never be able to pay back what’s due on that mortgage, forever indebted to the innumerable laughs, conversations, cries, piggyback rides, jam sessions, and by God the inordinate amount of FOOD I owe, that is one lease I’ll never sell. One loan I’ll never default on. Cheers to you Mollie, I wouldn’t trade this home for the world.