As it were, Home

Author's Note: I'm trying a few things out here; most pertinent is the intensely personal nature of what I'm writing. Truth be told, I haven't yet figured out how to end this to my satisfaction yet. Thus I beg comments on what works here and what doesn't. I further beg your patience, as this work may change (perhaps even substantially) as I figure out what I'm doing with it a bit better. It's important to me. Perhaps it's for that reason I'm having trouble with it. 

Written: 11/4

Last revision: 11/19

To the south is a city of rain and mist; bifurcated by the cruciform intersection of two great rivers, it sits quietly at the waters edge and lives a healthy life, growing slowly into the hills. As cities go it's smallish, though like a small bird it has all it's parts: infrastructure (or what passes for it); governance (generally good); shopping characterized by the eclectic, second hand, and gourmet; and citizens of every size, shape, and description living in an equally diverse number of neighborhoods.

I don't live in that city any more.

I came to it young, though not for lack of trying. Proud, loud, and somewhat overweight I took Portland by storm, roaring up the highway in an expensive car and gesturing expansively at my new environs. Intoxicated by freshly realized liberties and an impending undergraduate education, I might have been half as aware as I thought I was of my own state of mind and expectations. I was there to hobnob with peers, and real peers this time, not those hypocritical trust-fundlings I had spent the last twelve years associating with. I was there to learn and grow and become and conquer over all and, in the end, win the love and acceptance of the planet Earth, be crowned its king, and go on with the remaining ninety years of my life in peace and happiness.

A good deal farther to the south is a completely different city (though it's only recently grown enough to stop ranking "town"). A city of dust and ill-advised belt buckles and boots made from animals local (cow) and not (ostrich), Albuquerque's million-or-so inhabitants go on about quiet lives full of liberal politics and spicy foods. I fled as hard and as fast as I could. I had done all my growing to date there; like a garment worn since birth, it had never actually fit me and finally started to chafe. Though safely secular, my high school was jammed with all the same people I had attended junior high, middle school, elementary school, and kindergarten with. Our social circles thoroughly inbred and our opinion of one another hopelessly mired in the embarrassing formative years between 13 and 17, we hardly new what to say to one another by the time graduation struck in early May, 2002. Ever the black sheep (at the time I favored "pariah," for it's dramatic sting), I ached for people who walked and talked and dressed and thought and loved like I did. I wanted out, and I knew where I was going. Soon, I told myself, soon.

I could feel my mother wanting me to stay; my father flat-out told me to go. So I chose for myself as best as I could at 18 and went, driving the 2000 miles north to Portland, Oregon and it's scintillating educational systems. "Reed College, here I come," I actually said to myself as I-40 took me towards Flagstaff. A cliché on wheels, I could barely be stopped.

And I wasn't for four years. Not by the day I was called into two different professors offices (the invitations to do so spaced fifteen minutes apart, the meetings already scheduled not to conflict with classes or the other persons meeting with me). Not by my grades as I struggled to cope, un-medicated, with ADD. Certainly not by two powerful, long term relationships (one of which is no longer in effect). I picked up even more momentum during a semester abroad, living in Florence, fumigating every recess of my brain with Italian culture (a process that killed off more French verb conjugations than I ever thought possible). I lost some energy the next semester in a meeting with a music professor who sat me down and, with machete like delicacy, told me he couldn't understand why I had ever thought I could be a musician. But I never stopped.

I hit graduation day running full tilt. I had survived the gauntlet of my undergraduate dissertation, including the fire storm of last-minute revisions and a laughably complex orals board, and I was ready to be done. Family cheering me on, friends wearing their mortarboards, and meals with people I barely new served only to launch my girlfriend and I at high speeds into the dizzy excitement of packing up and Moving North.

Within two weeks of graduating we were living in a pre-war apartment in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Hardwood floors below us and a lake view out the window, Seattle greeted us with what I now recognize as uncharacteristic sunny weather. The warmth was not a ruse; since arriving, I've found Seattle's charms plentiful and sincere. Statuary lurks under bridges, waiting to charm folks lost on their way to Golden Gardens. Imponderably steep hills rise out of nowhere to give cyclists the workout of their lives before flinging them down the opposite side a velocities appropriate for escaping the gravity well of our Earth.

And then there's the restaurants, who don't so much hide as conceal themselves with numbers. It takes an incredible amount of food to support four million inhabitants; thus, eateries abound, each promising different joys. Some are lackluster and disappointing, others worth twice the already unethical prices. From the ethnic groceries to the yuppie organic MegaMarts, Seattle will feed you anything, at any hour, any day you choose.

The inhabitants are more reserved, but friendly in their own way. The last time I had to meet people we were throwing ourselves at each other, hunting for our new friends in the mob. It's colder outside the bubble; I'm not used to trying to track people down. Growing a social group is like growing legs: painful, a process of years. Many people are uninteresting (to me). Others, obnoxious. Some simply lack the resolve to make dinner plans and keep them, and many don't care for the sorts of nuances I relish (is it boredom, or is it ennui?).

I found myself drifting in my new life; in almost the same manner as space ships break free from the protective grasp of terra firma, I had already fought for speed and altitude and was now drifting, only slightly decelerating, in my new habitat.

Do I live here? Strictly speaking: of course I do. I wake and sleep and do everything in between in this new Seattle of mine. Albuquerque was a garment, Portland was it's own world; Seattle is an apparatus that I still don't understand the operations of. I cannot yet produce predictable results with the set of techniques I'm accustomed to using. I've a job which provides relatively satisfactory compensation for only somewhat unsatisfactory hours. My living space is, by my standards, downright bourgeois and shared with me by a woman I love.

Recently I went back down to Portland. It teems with the bulk of my dearest friends, many of my favorite restaurants, and the best grocery store ever conceived. It wasn't my first return visit, but the first was sudden, crazed, and happened very shortly after my departure. Distance and my new life formed a lens by which to view the city anew, filtering out certain old habits and presuppositions.

I found Portland more charming and easier to navigate. It was cleaner, and for the first time I found myself genuinely impressed by how well maintained the roads are. On my first ride, every bicyclist nodded at me as they passed (a gesture I had long taken for granted and never knew I missed). I ate simple, affordable vegetarian cooking, watched the sun burn gold and rose behind the west hills, and felt with an almost tearful nostalgia just how far away from my beloved Portland I had become.

Best and worst of all were the visits with my friends. In high school I relished few people, called almost nobody friend and meant it. Equal halves my own confusion and a lack of people I liked, I arrived at Reed and made all the friends I visited that weekend. Seeing them crystallized previously unremarked qualities of my new life; specifically, the absence of my friends from it. Whether it's strictly a quality of having known them for years or the nature of the people themselves, I've known nobody like them since leaving.

I no longer live in Portland. I've neither permanent residence nor employ. All that remains of the world I used to know is the people I shared it with, most of whom still live blocks from our school. I return only to visit in intervals bracketed by my work weeks; rather than the comfortably intertwined class schedules we used to share, I now see my friends only during their breaks from their jobs.

 All the same, it's difficult not to romanticize my old home -- even to long for it. It was the epicenter of The Good Life; it rests on the map like a symbol of the intoxicating academia that was my world, the tight community in which I lived, and the bittersweet work that was my life. I walked across the Reed College campus and it tugged at me coyly, the brick edifices murmuring the praises of the Master's program I could enroll in. I did exactly what I used to: I went and walked the Library.

The Eric V. Hauser Library is a modest edifice which houses some half-million books, an archive of all the undergraduate dissertations ever written at Reed, and a warren of computes, desks, class rooms, and offices.  Referred to by connoscienti as "the Fundome," I once quasi-inhabited a desk overlooking the periodicals. Hunched over my laptop,  researching and interpreting surrealist French poetry and the music it would become, the Fundome was my epicenter on Reed Campus. Late at night, my eyes only half focused after hours of deciphering Éluard, I would take walks through the halls. Sometimes observing my pseudo-family of other students, sometimes fixing my feet with a glassy stare, I quietly circumnavigated the entire building, floor by floor, until some spark of intellect returned (or I finally took myself home). 

On this particularly half-sunny Sunday I retraced my old steps, better rested, nourished, and paid than I ever had been before. I saw last year's Juniors -- this years Seniors -- hard at work on their own dissertations. In a moment of clarity I paused, staring at my old desk, and thought with honest happiness, "This is no longer my life. I did a good job. Now I'm finished here."

Familiar but somewhat estranged, I could feel Portlandia beckoning me to return -- a process that by definition means that I've left. In the end, I trotted back up to Seattle.