Float On

Today, in pictures, abbreviated version:

Mid-river waterfall


Mouth of Mettah Creek


Sentinel heron

Also noted: 2 bald eagles, an albino plover, 12 cars in the river, 14 tires, 1 boat, and about eleventy million feet of silt fencing. River inventory, post storm.

This is why I live here. Stop asking.

It's for you, Beeb.

Back then, we were living on the southern coast of Oregon, just outside of town. We posed as an engaged couple so we could rent the house; we posed as engaged to avoid the ire of the conservative retirement community. In fact, we were living in sin, I suppose. As with the original sin, it ended in banishment. But at the time, it felt so adult, and I felt so nested there. In retrospect, how young we were! It seems silly that it all felt so very important, permanent. Now, years later, I haven’t gone far. He, however, rocketed off and alighted 400 miles away, in a life completely foreign to me. We were so happy then, how dare he be happier now!

While I can clearly remember the nauseating emptiness when I returned to the house after being away to find him gone, gone, gone, that’s not what I remember most. I remember more clearly picking dandelions, building the garden, burying the baby chicken that didn’t make it (in the rain, under the big rock). I can still smell the sickly new-carpet fumes, which were neatly covered up by my sugar-fire accident. That Christmas when we made all those damn presents for everyone, the Moroccan dinner party. Him, repairing books on the pneumatic desk that was too heavy for me to remove after he left. Developing pictures in the laundry room. Walking across the river bridge into town. For some reason, what I remember best is the good stuff. That’s what makes remembering so sad.

The end of the year, the season of reckoning, is fast approaching, and I am half-way through my twenty-ninth year. I’m trying to accept that I am not the woman I thought I’d be, and sometimes recently I wonder if I left her up there in Oregon. She’s living out the life I was meant to have, and I’m cold and damp here by the ocean, huddled next to the heater and dreaming that we’ll cross paths again.

Reach out and chav someone

Dearest R: I am comforted to know that, even though I haven't seen you in years, you continue to occupy a small space in the world, and live and breathe somewhere not so very far away. We talk on the phone almost weekly, and I can't imagine what problems we can't solve in those hours. The connections between everything seem so clear when we talk, drawing the lines from one thing to the next. I like to imagine we are having coffee together, that we are at your house with your giant dogs, or at mine out on the porch. I appreciate that you exist, because I need you, and I don't ever say it enough: thank you for it all.

Stupid sad, and overslept

From the Iliad of Homer (transl. by Pope):

"Fix'd is the term to all the race of earth;
And such the hard condition of our birth:
No force can then resist, no flight can save,
All sink alike, the fearful and the brave."

Can't shake this. Back to bed.

My dog must be a Republican...

...because she keeps me up at night and she never has anything intelligent to say.

What we have been doing here

It’s that I can see my breath in the house in the mornings.

It’s the sink clogged slow by dog hair, my hair, the innards of a stuffed rat.

It’s finding the lost sock under the bed, weeks later.

It’s eating three eggs, half-cooked, for dinner because there’s nothing else.

It’s gin, and so much of it, but never enough.

It’s sleeping in on Sunday mornings, it’s your chin on my cheek.

It’s unopened mail rising like the leaning tower outside of the door.

It’s talking on the porch in the middle of the night.

It’s him, and him, and him, and you.

It’s ‘Virginia gone quite mad while shaving her armpits.’

It’s running, and pushing, and hating but mostly kidding.

It’s what we have been doing here.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Lunch (or: There's Been Too Much Carver Around Here)

“I’m done with him,” she says, rearranging her cigarette lighter on the table so the sun catches its’ surface and spikes into her empty glass. “It’s tiring, and I want to be free to do other things; he’s getting in the way.”

Crossing to the fridge for more ice, all I can muster is “mm hmm.” I have the creeping feeling she is waiting for me to defend him. He and I were friends, after all, in the way back. Classmates in primary school and the like.

“He wants me to be there for him, but when is he ever there for me?” She holds her glass out for the ice offered, swirls it around.

“Like last week when he changed your tire,” I suggest, adding whiskey to our glasses and stretching my legs out onto the empty chair. “Wasn’t that him doing something for you?”

“Yeah, but that was practical, that wasn’t something I wanted, it was something I needed.” She sighs and takes a pull off her glass. “Plus, the sex just isn’t that good.”

“It’s apparently good enough that you keep ending up together. He’s a good man; so what if he isn’t sweet? You can’t have it all.” It doesn’t feel like the right thing to say, but it’s the best I can do. I know she can do better, but she isn’t so sure. It’s going to take time to convince her, if she can even be convinced.

She’s pushing the toast crumbs on the table in front of her into parallel lines, first one way, then the other. “I just don’t have the energy for it anymore. I’m starting to hate him.”

This strikes me as odd, and I sip from my glass to keep from saying so. She spent three whole years pining for him, during which I spent endless conversations listening to his virtues extolled, his actions analyzed, his movements detailed. If she hates him, it’s only that they hate each other, and that’s what keeps them together. The whiskey burns my throat as I light one of her cigarettes, waiting. The smoke curls blue in the sunlight, sweeping in unexpected arcs with the draft from the open window.

“I’m done with him. I’m not doing this anymore.” She sighs again and gulps her drink, chewing the ice as she looks questioningly at me.

I sit and wait, knowing that she will not leave him, knowing that she will speak first.