bird by bird

Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier You always hear about it— a waitress serves a man two eggs over easy and she says to the cashier, That is the man I’m going to marry, and she does. Or a man spies a woman at a baseball game; she is blond and wearing a blue headband, and, being a man, he doesn’t say this or even think it, but his heart is a homing bird winging to her perch, and next thing you know they’re building birdhouses in the garage. How do they know, these auspicious lovers? They are like passengers on a yellow bus painted with the dreams of innumerable lifetimes, a packet of sepia postcards in their pocket. And who’s to say they haven’t traveled backward for centuries through borderless lands, only to arrive at this roadside attraction where Chance meets Necessity and says, What time do you get off?

Once I made it to Denver, I unpacked my Jeep and put all my belongings in LS's storage unit (Thanks, girl!). LS graciously let me stay with her in Englewood for my first week while I got settled, and all I really remember from that week was aggressively trying to reconnect with every single person that I knew in this city. A job and apartment would come eventually,  I figured, but I needed friends, and I needed friends stat. That week I had breakfast with JF at Snooze, a picnic with KS in Wash Park, lunch with WL, a baseball game with AI, and even a blind friend date with another friend's friend SH. Oh yeah, I meant business. The hardest part of leaving New York was leaving the people, so that was the first box I needed to check in Denver, and I will say, I did a pretty damn good job. 10 days into my new Denver life, I moved into a 7-week sublet in West Wash Park with two fat cats named Crookshanks and Chow. Their owner/kitty mama was on a backpacking adventure in Slovenia,

On Friday, June 4th I drove for 12 hours straight; that's as many hours in one day as I had driven in the past 6 years combined . And I drove it with my mom. We left South Dakota at 8:00AM and 6 bathroom breaks, 700+ miles, and 1 failed Snapchat tutorial* later we had arrived. This is our (snap) story: *I attempted to make a Snap Story of our road trip, but my creativity was stunted by the apparent need for me to stay in our lane. I tried to verbally teach my mom the finer points of snapchat while driving, but if you can imagine that was a total disaster. God lover her for trying!

So, I live in Denver now! I've actually been here a full three and a half months already, but I haven't been  fully inspired to sit down and write about it until now (when I have literally a hundred other things I need to do #typical). This has been such a challenging, illuminating, and fun time in my life that I need to stop, drop, and write now more than ever, and quick! before I forget everything! Here's what I remember and don't ever want to forget. I left NYC on Friday, May 27th at 5AM. Uber prices were surging, so I stood on a street corner with 6 rats (I counted) scurrying by my feet until I spotted a yellow cab.  I bartered with the driver to take me to Newark airport for a flat rate of $100, and the sun came up as we drove West, over the Brooklyn Bridge toward Manhattan, then under the tunnel to New Jersey. As we drove, I tried to breath in every last New York City drop but my Coldplay-level of feelings were interrupted by my driver who was curious about