I love to hear the stories behind people's scars. You know -- the death-defying skateboard bungle that caused a permanent dark spot on someone's thigh. Or the downstairs fall that left a slash on a forehead.

Tonight, because I'm moving soon, I was covering up the gouges that have formed in my apartment over the past two years. There are chips and marks here and there, from my futon scraping the wall. A wine stain on the carpet. And the worst offense is that my ceiling features muti-colored ribbons of gaffer's tape shavings -- known only to indoor hoopers. Hoop scars. That's what I've heard them called.

I was working toward erasing all of these chips and marks, when I started to consider the moments that caused them: intense living room hooping sessions (in the dark, dancing to my shadow from the kitchen light), sitting on the futon with Michael, grading my students' papers -- on my floor, over a glass of wine that was probably spilled during hoop procrastination. I had to sit down and reminisce, and it hit me that today is *exactly* two years since I arrived in Eugene. To the day.

I had come straight from Burning Man, with my little hatchback packed full of everything I own. Before that, I had driven from Detroit to Nevada by myself. I didn't know anyone in Oregon. I was totally shocked to find myself uprooting and starting over -- alone. I had so many friends in Detroit, and constant gigs as Revolva, and I had never lived by myself in my entire life.

Even now, it kind of blows my mind that I did this.

I remember my first night here, with only an air mattress for furniture, thinking, "What the fu*%?" A few weeks later, I recall trying to go dance at the Tango Center, but instead becoming engulfed by the Eugene Celebration. In my three-inch-high heels, lipstick and tango-y attire, I practically sprinted aboard the Triceratops (art car), and told Emily and Maja from Tribe of Eve and Ananda from Dragon Tribe and Jade from Fire Groove, "I just got here from Detroit. I'm so excited to find my people!"

At the time, I thought they must be rolling their eyes. I was fancied-up for tango and probably looked *nothing* like their kind of people. But I just hung out with Emily the other night, and she said she totally remembers that moment.

"I took your card home and kept it," she said. "No one ever introduces themselves like that in Eugene."

It's interesting that over the past two years, I've performed alongside everyone I met that night. I've also developed intense bonds in other social circles. This is fast-forwarding through a lot of hard work, though. Standing at gatherings with no one to fall back on if I didn't feel like putting myself out there too hard. Spending time in my apartment alone. Gathering phone numbers and having to be the one to call around to see what was going on (not counting on a net, the way I could in Detroit). The first month was the hardest. But it was also the most exciting, the time with the most potential.

I let the positive possibilities behind the gigantic question mark of "What's going to happen?" carry me. I actually miss how much energy I had at the beginning.

I could write 18 paragraphs about what's happened since. I could also sum it up by saying that it felt like I was bursting through a surface on my exit from the D and my entrance into Eugene ... and since then, it has seemed like I stepped off to the side and just took a 2-year time out. In the past, I've learned a lot by physically moving through the world -- traveling through Asia or Europe, living in downtown Detroit, going places, doing stuff, being more juice-ily alive.

My motion has progressively wound down these past two years to the point where, for a while, it feels like "my path" has involved ... sitting on the side of a path, resting. Dropping out of school. Breaking up. Working from home. For some reason, struggling to book gigs. I've just been here, meditating, hooping, spelunking through my thoughts and feelings like an adventurer shining lights into a cave. I'm not going to lie; it has been some ROUGH sh*t! I doubt most people EVER sit with themselves and feel the funk for half as long as my two year soul-searching sentence.

I guess painting over these scars, I realized how that act is symbolic of the final stages of healing. It tugs at my heart to think about the experiences that formed the marks in my home -- the people who have been in here with me, the time I've spent with myself. It's disconcerting to shift space. Again. But I've done everything I came here to do (I did need time to contend with certain things), and now I'm ready to move on. Today is an exact book end on moving to Eugene.

Time to make some new stories.