So if we are constantly internalizing our surroundings, if we really carry everything we ever encounter around with us for the rest of our lives, here’s five things I’ve carried very close to the surface this week.

1. My grandmother cried last Sunday night. I was getting on a plane in about 12 hours, moving 1800 miles away. She had going-away gifts, as strange as any she’d ever given me: two boxes of cookies and a new purse, a small businessy black thing better suited for my sister than me, who is forever lugging around ratty tote bags. And this tiny woman who I will look exactly like in 60 years and barely know, she’s crying so bad that I cry too. Not until I get home do I open the purse and find a new red leather wallet inside. In the coin purse is a set of black rosary beads. She does not know I’m an atheist. She only mentions god when something bad happens. She wants to protect me and does not know how else to do it. So I carry them. I carry my family and the awkward love and the anger and the confusion, wandering around this new city still with no place permanent to go.

2. The last time I saw him was that Sunday morning. A quadruple breakfast-date, all of us tired and hungover and basking in the brightness of mind that comes with the morning after a party like Kat and I had, full of people we love and respect. We said goodbye a bit (an hour? two hours?) later, standing on the sidewalk at the foot of the stoop I’d resolved every crisis of the past year on. They were idling at the curb, waiting to take me and all my boxes into Queens. I hated it, the brightness of the sun, the publicness of the sidewalk, the noise of the engine. The normality of the surroundings. Nothing I could do.

3. The sky here is about seven different shades of blue. Lighter, paler, at the horizon where it meets the mountains, deeper overhead. It is hard to believe it is the same sky above New York, the same sky that’s rose-red over Broadway, over the Rockaways at dusk. It’s so hard to believe that I don’t believe it at all.

4. We made dinner together the other night, chicken oven-roasted with garlic, fried orange tomatoes and zucchini, baby spinach salad. Leftovers go into breakfast this morning, we pit the works of Vonnegut against one another. Slaughterhouse-Five was mostly a struggle against himself, she says. “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets” is better than the whole novel. Mother Night is by far his best, I tell her, because it’s the most ethically troubling. I tell her the plot, that I’ve got a copy waiting to be shipped out here. She has taken me into a completely different life and I am still me, we are still us.

5. It seems like everyone under 30 out here has a cracked windshield. Last night Bryan and Kat and I are driving home from the festival in Boulder. I ride in front with him, since I’m his “new best friend” and I’ve forgotten how he drives: 110, with his knees, smoking a bowl on the highway. I am very quiet, except for when I think there’s no way we can slow down in time to not rear-end a van towing a trailer. Then I yell, “HOLY SHIT, BRYAN!” And we are fine, and the highway arches, and suddenly we are high above the city, looking down on the lights glittering like the ocean in the sun. And I notice for the first time that Bryan’s windshield is perfectly intact.