Grad school letter, first draft

I recently got a divorce from my now ex-wife. After a year and two months she woke up one morning and decided it was over. A few days later her parents drove out from Oklahoma with a Uhaul trailer hitched to their mini-van and packed her up and took her home. This was happened just after we both graduated from college in may of 2007 and just days before we were to move to a cozy mill town outside of Baltimore, Maryland, which is where I am from and she spent months convincing me to move to.
After she left me I hung around Albuquerque, where we lived for a few months just moving through life. I worked at the news station that hired me part time after college for eight bucks an hour. That I graduated Summa Cum Laude, have six years of production experience and a certificate in video production meant nothing to them, or anyone else it seems(ed). As time passed I got a few promotions and was offered a position in the newsroom with a contract and a better wage 28 the first year 31 the second, that is thousands a year. I made twice that with no experience and no degree at the age of twenty-one.
As I spent most nights alone, my only friends in Albuquerque were men, I often thought of suicide and woke up stressed out at three a.m., thinking of how fucked up everything was. Sometimes I would cry uncontrollably when I would try to make sense of it all. Sometimes I would just pace or lay in bed, my mind running attempting to add up my life.
I kept wanting to leave Albuquerque, and I kept coming up with reasons why I shouldn’t. Many of these reasons were helped along by my friends. Some reasons had to do with my ex-wife telling me I couldn’t leave so the divorce would be finalized; others were friends and family telling me of the importance of my job or how Baltimore was the wrong place for me to go back to or how in these times just sitting still was the answer, until things got better. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
So I continued to stay, I couldn’t figure out how to move, I believed they were right. I was also fucking scared out of my mind of ending up homeless and hungry, and I had no idea where I wanted to go or how to get there. Especially, with boxes of art, a 7600 printer, 9- 5 foot by four foot prints from my thesis show and a mattress I had just bought before my wife left.
Then the day before my new promotion started I couldn’t sleep, again. My computer had just died. Just a hard drive deal, but when it died I realized all my artwork on disc, all my back up discs, all my programs had been accidentally taken to Oklahoma. My wife responded to the situation denying she had them.
As I lay in bed that night, after crying histaricly about my life. - Sometimes when I want to die I don’t even know where the pain comes from –I relized what some of the weight was, and maybe some of the problem, or the next step.
Once my wife left I had no idea who I was, in part because I had just tried to make a marriage work for a year, in part because I just graduated school, throw in being thirty and living in Albuquerque, 2300 miles from where I had spent the first 25 years of my life. All of my work for the last four years was about my identity, my identity in the landscape of America, seeing my country was somehow synonomous with with the evolution of myself, and moreover with understanding that I am who I am, where ever I am. Yet suddenly I had no idea who I was, only the feeling that I was dying. That where I was was never to get better. That I was suddenly not participating in my destiny, that fear had consumed me, that all my rejectionist ideals, the same ideals that allowed me to give a car back to a lender so I could use my money to make art, the same ideals that lead me to throw myself to the wolves and get into movie making, the same ideals that allowed me to wake up one day and move to Albuquerque, those ideals were buried, gone, forgotten. The Midwestern woman had one, she had the whole time we were married, tried to make me her middle class parents, she shunned me for being an artist even though she was one. That I believe is why she left. She didn’t think I could care for her the middle class way. And she’s right. But I am still walking around trying to assimilate.
And it is not working. So here is the next step, here is the weight. All this material crap, all this art, this bed this printer it just must go and so must I.
So I’m dropping it off on the loading dock of the Albuquerque Museum and getting in the car and driving to somewhere in the dead of winter. I just hope the car makes it. The last time I did this I made four years worth of bad ass art, which can be seen at www.colingabriel.com. This time I want a few movies along with whatever beautiful objects I can create that never fill up my house again. Attach to nothing.
I'll have my camera, maybe I'll keep my printer (doubt it)so, maybe I'll make the next "The Americans". I have always wanted too, too bad I don't have a Peggy.
As I start this journey I have no idea where I will end up. I will be receiving mail at my sisters house, cause she just bougtht it and she doesn’t have the one off gene that causes her to up and leave. I don’t know where I will go or really that I will even make it, but by next fall I hope to be in your graduate program furiously producing aesthetic pleasure that articulates an empathetic and evocative experience. And if I survive that maybe I will teach so I can have summers off an get paid to run through the landscapes of the world figuring out the human experience.