Dear northeast corner of E John and 11th: it's been a good two years, and I didn't want to just leave without saying goodbye. These last few days of coming around the back, up the cement steps and down into the entryway have made me realize that these are some of the last days I'll take these steps, or at least the last time I'll take them as the person who has a pile of items on the other side of the door.

You're the first place I've lived for more than sixteen months since... oh, my senior year in high school I think. I've lived in vans, studios, cute places, gross places, owned a home, been married, been wasted, gotten sober -- but not once have I hit the twenty-four month mark in any one place of residence. I guess I must have been looking for something? I don't know if it was not coming out, or the simple pains of growing up, or some hippie wanderlust romanticized lifestyle I made all of those things out to be. But it seems as though staying still for this long has been good for me.

I've learned a whole new level of "fake it til' you make it" these last two years: I've learned that acting positive leads to being positive, and that all those people who told me stories about acting my way into right thinking instead of the other way around were righter than I think even they knew. I live much more tolerant-ly and conscious-ly. And who knows if this has anything to do with you, little apartment, but it's what's happened to me in these walls.

Ballard, here I come.