Lately, I’ve been exploring the nooks and crannies of my city, wandering the streets along with the tourists, pretending, too, that I am a tourist with my backpack and my camera and my curious way of looking at almost everything. My clothes, I think, give me away; I have been wearing—now that it is colder and rainier—what I call Pacific Northwest clothing, which involves all things synthetic and low-top hiking boots masquerading as sneakers.

I decided—last month or so—that it’s time to change, time to move, time to leave. So I’m taking the necessary steps to move forward, into a new city, into a new life, which won’t likely happen for another year and a bit, but I grin each time I think about this, each time I think about the way my body feels when I remember exploring the brick and steel and concrete of this city in which I am going to implant my life. So this leaving—this leaving that I am always doing in every aspect of my life—is forcing me to explore my own city even more.

Today I go to the museum, even though it’s the weekend and I typically don’t do things like this on the weekends because there are too many people, too many cars, too many lines. But there is an exhibit I want to see, and I happen to have today off work, so I ride there on my scooter even though it is cold, but it is not too cold, and, more importantly, it is not raining. I love rain, love it in the way that I love drinking water, but I don’t particularly like riding a motorized vehicle around in the cold air and the cool rain—because my knees hurt when raindrops slam into them at 35+ miles an hour. For the record, it is like having three inch nails repeatedly driven into your knee caps.

I don’t know much about Michelangelo, save for the obvious things that most people know, but I explore images that the Seattle Art Museum says the artist has “not approved of this image.” I laugh when I read this tag line, laugh even more when I see it on posters at the museum. I love things like this, love the creativity behind the people behind the masks behind the pens behind the paper.

Later, I spill myself onto the street and wander toward an architecture store where I touch things and read things and meander my way through books and objects and containers. I have a thing for containers: houses, boxes, books, papers, bread, wood, metal, skin; because the structure—its outline—is beautiful to me. Inside this outer shell there is another container encasing other container encasing other container; and I am reminded of how this circle of encasement is never-ending.

When I was in grade-school, my teacher gave us a sheet of paper and instructed us to tear it into halves. There was nothing special about this piece of paper, nothing magical. We tore and tore and tore, and when we got down to something our tiny and nimble fingers could no longer tear in half, she told us what would happen. She said we would need tinier and tinier “hands” to tear the pieces. And I wondered, then, how small a thing needed to be before it was no longer able to be torn into halves. This thought has never left me. Ever.

And so I sit at a bar, drink delicious pints of beer, and think about how many times I have torn my life in half—torn it into pieces and torn it into pieces again. And I think that it is not possible to tear it in half again, yet I can hear that tearing sound like a low-level hum … and this sound makes me smile while I start to move my life into a new direction.