Portland, Oregon (In One Sentence)

Being moved this past week by moving through a city and forest that made me.

Where you come from is where you are is where you are going and Portland this week feels like the afterlife—so perfect, so cloudless, so overcome by magnolia fragrance and jorts and pasty punker biker sweeties with sidecars full of oat milk sorbets and cats on leashes and liberation flags flown everywhere and go ahead, go up into Forest Park, go up old Leif Erickson to Alder to Wildwood and back down Wild Cherry and watch as chronos plays tricks and collapses in on itself, watch as a past Self blurs into a present Self and where time and place merge until all that’s left is one flowing and fluid body trying to return to (love) himself, and it’s here, here in this blurring-near-to-fainting magic of an urban forest, here as I pause in the near-dark with a stomach of beans and rice, where I’ve returned to a city that so deeply shaped me years ago, and apparently continues to, English ivy still suffocating everything despite relentless volunteer hacking—our stubborn world trying to find proper footing wherever it can—just as Dogwood puffs and robin chests fill the eye-heart while I try and make sense of passing all three of my old apartments during my five years here and stopping to take a single photo of each of them—the one where my favorite fixie bike, “Hipster Cupcake,” was stolen, the one with the single refurbished twin mattress on the floor, the one where love was made and unmade behind that crummy brick wall—I stand with these emptied shells, containers that have never stopped filling and unfilling with other lives and other stories, and it’s here in these tidal charts where life flows on, where grief spurts from my eyes, a welcome surprise, really, welcomed because such emotion confirms a body to still be caught off-guard, still moved by the great unspooling tongue of a never-not-hurling world, and now we have two nodes of perspective: the life we’ve chosen to live and the past life we once lived, a bridge of memory among a city sutured in bridges—transects built by choices and chances and uncountable moments—and back to that grief, a burst of gravity and weight and shadow that instantly sublimates the moment into something razor-sharp, a sensation of becoming radically attentive-alert-alive, confirming that, yes, this world tumbles forth with or without me, expiration everywhere and imminent, you being replaced by a younger you always, you surviving the dead always, you, precious and privileged enough to gaze back at a past home that still stands, a then-life flooding your now-bones, that all this life might be is working our way along some unknowable foot path toward some unknowable destination but moving ahead anyhow, that these moments where we confront a past life make it exceedingly clear that we are all required to attend to this unfolding as open-eyed double agents of witness—thick-skinned enough to endure but thin-skinned enough to remain enchanted—that we are co-authors with this living world, the one who’s always nudging us to read their revisioning, and that the emotion percolating after returning to a formative past chapter is to both see it in the review mirror while finding something soft in that past you, too, the one who felt so self-important, so earnest, so consequential—that peering up into your studio corner apartment, into the rainshadow of a breakup, a dark and darkening and now-fully-dark forest catches us all in the end, just as it catches me here and now, piling through seasons and hacking at the colonizing vines within and ready to grow again anyhow, that this past-present pipeline of being enlivened by the equivalence of our gains as well as our losses does its job in transmuting through simple attention: watching the backs of slugs, huffing the musk of red cedar bark, running fingertips along these seasons in the night, these cycles coursing through us all, and yet the thing I’m beginning to see now is to celebrate these laps exactly as they are, because they are numbered, and that’s exactly what brings such high resolution to the budding rose, the blushing trillium, and maybe the tinging sadness in the return is also to see how little we’ve actually changed, how humbling it feels to have such similar thoughts and diversions and fantasies at 41 as I once did here at 21, that while so much changed, so much remains durably the same, and that I can actually locate solace in how sturdy that feels—cash-only pizza and crystal-juggling bookstores and corner soap stores wafting their spring sale—it’s here where I choose to declare aloud to this dusk-sizzled forest, the one I swear is listening, the one I swear knows and remembers me, the one I swear sees me because I’ve learned over so many thousands of miles to see them back, that, thank god, thank the holy, thank the great mystery or whatever the hell you call it, that this forest, this world, this expiring and exploding life, this city of rain still knows how to drink the sun.