If I lose you in the streets, if I lose you in the streets, if I lose you.

"On Moving"

Make coffee on the first morning. Start the pot before you shower (and you should shower on the first morning); then you'll taste the smoky black heat as a clean, new person ready to go be alive in the world. It's coffee from home, and that's important. You'll have the rest of your new life to experiment. Make coffee from home on the first morning.

Take it with a cigarette on the porch. Familiarize yourself with this new routine, this new porch. The birds sound different, the scattering squirrels more domesticated, but don't be alarmed. These are the fixtures of your mornings now. The pony-tailed pool boy (did I mention your new mornings include a view of the pool?) fishes something from the water with a large net. Wave to him, offer a cigarette. He doesn't smoke, and why should he? There's work to be done, a big normal day ahead of him, and you're just here learning how to wake up somewhere new.

Drop the cigarette, your last of a mauled pack of Parliaments, into the Wendy's cup. Swirl it around with the other butts (cigarette bones, Dad used to call them) until you hear the death rattle hiss. Excellent. Don't rush back inside just yet. Enjoy the rest of your coffee. Don't be intimidated. This is your morning, too.

The time will come, after the morning news but before it's too hot to consider venturing out, when you'll need to go exist in your new city. Make a good mix: a few old favorites for familiarity, a few songs you've been meaning to hear properly -- something lively, exciting, forward-looking. Drive somewhere. Get turned around in the tapestry of street signs you haven't yet memorized. These songs sound good in this new context, different. They're different songs now. Pass people who know where they're going.

Your old boss, a prickled European who grew up without cartoons but has a good head on his shoulders all the same, calls to see how you're adjusting. Ignore this. Call him back later. Eventually you'll figure out how to live in both worlds, but not now.

Things are excellent, excellent, excellent.

Use this time to iron out the details of your romanticized vision of this new life. You can map out six years in twenty minutes, because you know none of this will pan out the way you imagine. Think about school, about being a name in the department. Think about the people who will hate your fiction. Think about how they are douche bags. Think of early morning bike rides to the University. What is fall like here?

Sex! Don't forget to think about the great sex you'll be having. Think about those early morning glasses of water, the exhaustion and laughter. Think about the girl you'll meet who loves Carver, then think about reading Carver in bed with her. She's never read Will You Please Be Quiet Please?, which you think is absurd and tell her so. But you've never read Furious Seasons -- so, there's that. You'll read memorable passages aloud to each other, the same passages the other has long since committed to memory. [I laid back my arm and I hollered, "Now!" I threw that son of a bitch as far as I could throw it. "I don't know," I heard him shout. "I don't do motion shots." "Again!" I screamed, and took up another rock.] You'll be reading to each other, basically.

But these things -- the school, transitional seasons, the girl -- these things are specters, phantoms. Hyper-reality, you read about that in Gravity's Rainbow and inwardly congratulated yourself for retaining it. Maybe that's what it is. But still, it's all there somewhere -- all waiting, like you, to wake up and be alive in a different place