After posting the letter I jotted down the list swimming in my head: find a moving company, cancel next year’s lease, polish up my resume, let Mom know I was moving. I mentally winced at this last item; I hadn’t talked to her in six months, because we’d argued over my “dead-end job and dead-end boyfriend” after I’d turned down a job in her firm. She’d never forgiven me for not going into law like her, and when I’d flat-out refused to work in her office, she’d exploded. I decided to tell her I had broken up with Dylan and not the other way around; I didn’t want to endure the “I told you so” speech I was sure I’d get if I admitted he’d left me, which she said he’d do from the beginning. I hated it when she was right.

Dana returned from lunch and we chatted a bit as we worked. Having moved from Boston to Chicago, she had a bit more experience in the whole relocation thing, so she gave me some ideas of where to start. At the end of the day I went back to the bookstore, a habit I was beginning to enjoy, and browsed through the travel section looking at books on California. Gary lived in a small town in Southern California called Rancho Los Lagos; it seemed as good a place as any to start my search for employment, so I took down some notes of nearby town names, and then went home to spend the evening in front of my computer.

It didn’t take long for my bubble to get close to bursting. California was way more expensive than Illinois. Moving in and of itself was more costly than I’d anticipated. But it was the thought of leaving the state I’d grown up in for a place I’d never even visited that was really starting to scare me.

Now, I am usually a smart girl. I tend to lean toward logic and reason when dealing with problems, and for the most part I have a lot of common sense. But there are times when, for no apparent reason, I make decisions that don’t seem to make any sense at all. One might look at all the evidence I am faced with, and then look at my response, and think that I must not have studied the evidence to begin with. For instance, downing six mixed drinks in an hour on my twenty-first birthday after a full seven-course meal. Or staying with Dylan. I know what the logical choice is, but the fact is, I just don’t care.