ramblings on wheels (& a lot of parenthesis)

I have to admit, since moving to my new apartment, I feel old. This new place offers the illusion that I’ve got things figured out just because I live on my own and have my own bedroom. (I still just can’t get over that: SO blessed to have landed here.) I think part of the influence comes from the fact that the building itself is quite old, built in 1907, and offers old-age charm like high ceilings & original plumbing as well as attracts a wider variety of tenants (as opposed to the hip, new building I was at before).

But really, I come home, make dinner (something I haven’t had time to do consistently in so long), maybe do the dishes (life without a microwave or dishwasher is seriously amazing; teaches me to slow down a bit), watch an episode of something, read, write, record a song, feed the turtle, walk the dog—any variation of these things. It’s all very “adult”, and I haven’t figured that out: while most of my peers are going out to bars and drinking excessively and hooking up with strangers, I’m home pretending to be better than them because I’m “accomplishing life goals” and can drink a glass of wine with dinner & be in bed by 10:30 and still get seven hours of sleep.

Don’t get me wrong: I love this. I think it’s amazing to be here with so much going on outside and having time and space to write and play with my dog—but I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing out or at least missing something. I don’t want what others my age have; I’m not a get-drunk-on-weeknights kind of person, or really a get-drunk-at-all kind of person. Admittedly, I haven’t even intentionally gone to a bar yet in the year+ that I’ve been in Seattle (by intentionally, I mean, there are places that I go to eat that serve alcohol that have a bar in them, but I don’t go there to drink).

So if I can’t keep up the writer’s life without feeling like I’m missing something, and I’m not a public drinker (sorry, Hem), then what is it?

I’m starting to get an idea. It’s the road. I miss the road. I miss having a car and the freedom to just go for a drive and end up somewhere new and have new experiences outside of the city. There is much to see here, of course, and I love it, but I don’t always fit in with the city-vibe (one reason I didn’t move to Capitol Hill, though everyone I know says I’d fit in great there…). I like to stay home, but I like to adventure beyond the city limits. I can’t even get to Ikea in my current situation. Further, I’ve also realized that things like zipcar & car-2-go are out of reach as well because my phone doesn’t have an app for them (this is soon to change…).

Do I regret selling my car? Not at all: it’s a season. Though my car was great, it’s been such a blessing to not have to pay for insurance, worry about parking, continually not afford repairs. It’s also taught me a lot about dependence—I can’t get everywhere I want to anymore. While I bike, bus, or walk most places, not everywhere is within reach, so I’ve learned to depend on others for a ride or borrowing their car for a day or so.

I’m starting to get the feeling, though, that this will not be a prolonged season. In my journal, I made an oath to myself that I wouldn’t buy a car until my student loans were paid off. I think I’m a liar because I don’t think I could go about 5-10 years without road trips or weekend get-aways. Plus if I go to grad school (God-willing it would be funded, but if not…) those loans would get bigger, not smaller. In the meantime, my puppy & I need to go!

I told my sister that if she moved back West, I’d immediately get a car so I could visit her. (I’m obsessed with roadtrips, and West-coast drives are so scenic, vast, and variant that I forget that the rest of the world exists—like when I drove through a snowstorm in Oregon to get to the dry deserts of Phoenix.)

I also resolved to myself that I would wait to get a car until I moved to Montana for grad school (why do I make such strange resolutions that are based on options floating in the air that I have no commitment to?). Everything is so unpredictable that I can’t keep a single promise to myself about the future (I really don’t have the final say, thank God).

So here I am: sitting on the couch, as I have been, admittedly, most of the weekend (the unceasing winter rain makes the couch very appealing) and probably will be tomorrow as well. I’ve spent my time doing yoga (not on the couch, obviously), reading Pride & Prejudice (which I can’t spell (pride & prejuice?) and have—for shame— never read before), and snuggling with my dog with a lavender scented pillow under my head & a tie-dyed blanket that Katlin made for Derek years ago keeping us warm, as Pickle’s little (actually large, but as she is still a puppy (and always will be to me), all of her accounts for “little”) head sticks out above my feet, warming my toes under her whiskered chin.

Who knows what’s next? Seriously. I change my mind so much that I am beginning to wonder if I even have a mind—it’s probably just a bunch of pieces of a brain all mushed together trying to function as one. Who knows when I’ll next have wheels (God knows I can’t even think of affording that right now) or even leave the couch (very much affordable to stay put right here!)? For the most part, we’re happy, Pickle & me, and that’s all that matters. 

oneyearlater

It would rain today.

My roommate now has a boyfriend, so our Friday night movies are officially over as marked by today—rain. No good to do much outside as the first of fall’s gloom settles in: a teaser of what’s to come. I’m starting to understand Seattle’s seasons.

I tried to make plans but failed. Most of them in my head, making up reasons that people couldn’t come over or me just not wanting to go out. So I didn’t. Pickle and I stayed in.

“Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective.”

Pickle & I, well, I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower. There is a small list of reasons this movie ended up in my DVD player:

1. the book has been a favorite since middle school

2. the sound track is perfect

3. Emma Watson

4. it was on sale at Target

5.  it makes Pittsburgh real—it drives me right through the Fort Pitt tunnel: sense of home

Tomorrow, my parents will pack a big ol’ truck and come to Seattle. They are bringing the rest of my life out. The material things, anyways—the bookshelf my dad made many moons ago; the turtle house my dad and I made two years ago; my pet tortoise who lives in the turtle house, of course; a kiln by which I have yet to make new things; the books that have comforted me like a wool blanket—heavy and warm. They’re bringing all of it out here just for me. So many miles.

I can’t help but think that this is it—the one-year mark. Monday will make it official—August 5^th.  Remember how a year ago, I was climbing in the window of my wretched first place here? I'm only on my third apartment...My “plan” was to come here, get a degree, and leave to sunnier skies. Well, I got here, and that’s about as much of that list as I’ve accomplished. I have no intention of leaving anything soon.

Funny how determined we can be once our minds are made up. Like how it had to be that I would stay home with Derek. Like how I had to graduate early and move far away. Like how that far away had to be Seattle, not Arizona.

Lately, when I look at the Space Needle at night, wholly illuminated such that it glows more than the others buildings, I can only think it must be fake. It cannot really be there; I cannot really be here. How did I get here? How has a whole year passed already? I guess it’s really only like eleven months actually in Seattle if you count all of my road trips and escapes; nearly a whole month on the road, out of the city.

And here I am preparing to sell my car. No more open road. This country girl is ready for a new kind of adventure: full immersion in the city. We already live in Uptown, walking distance to all we need; bus to everything we don’t; bike to everything in-between. When I bought my car three years ago, I told myself that I would drive it until it died—it’s a ’99 Subaru and had 51,000 miles on it at the time. 40-some thousand miles later, it’s still running strong, but I just don’t need it.

That car carried me back and forth to Waynesburg for a whole semester. It lost a mirror parked out on the street there. It got its door jammed in the day of Derek’s funeral. It drifted through the winding hills of Kentucky and the unseen horizon of Texas and the brilliant New Mexican stars and back again. Then through the National Parks and Monuments on the drive West to Seattle. Then through snow storms and desert in the same trip to Phoenix and back.

Damn.

In the movie, they’re listening to “Heroes” by David Bowie and driving through the Fort Pitt tunnel, and they come out to the Pittsburgh skyline and the bridges and the signs. “Monroeville>>>>>” I think of the times I took that exit, the brilliance of the city that I didn’t see too often.

One morning in particular comes to mind. I dropped my parents off at the airport. It was two weeks before Derek died. I had just gotten back from Italy a week or two before. The world was new to me. Derek was going to get better. I was home again. We were going have a great semester together. This was how the world was always supposed to be.

It was four in the morning. The sky was pink with the strange light of dawn not yet peaked coming over Appalachia. The city was quiet, still. The freeway was a glorious open-air speed path before me, unlike the tight curves that led to the stuffy hospital every day.

My iPod was on shuffle. The windows were down. “On the Bus Mall” by the Decemberists came on, a song I had somehow never noticed.

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”

Adventures in Photos and Phoetry & too much alliteration

I.

It only makes sense that it would rain the whole way back to Seattle.

The whole weekend was beautiful. Warm sun, enough to shade my shoulders pink, reflected cartoon-vibrant color all over.

II.

Of course, it didn’t start that way. It started with a canopy of mist, with fog hanging between the trees like the morning’s ghost as Pickle and me drove through central Oregon around 6am.

III.

And we were on the road.

Open.

Nearly empty.

Ours.

South.

Landscaped whirred, a mile a minute.

We faced the wind.

IV.

For fifteen hours, we drove and drove to match the sun, watching it like a rainbow, arced above our heads.

But the closest we saw, were spurts of leftover color in the sky.

V.

Road-trippin’

the way it should be

Hour after hour

asleep

at the wheel

Taking a new route,

my navigator

failed

VI.

But we made it.

Two sisters

swam in a river

in Saturday’s sun

and the beginning

of summer’s warm

rock beds and air

dry curls.

And meeting

for the first time

VII.

Tent-sleeping

is always warm

when you have a scarf

named Pickle,

but waking up,

choking

under her weight

is almost worth the cold.

VIII.

Home isn’t so far

when every turn

could be East

or West

at the same time.

It is Appalachia

only taller.

IX.

Are we there yet?

She’s a stud.

X.

And just like that,

we’re back to the streets,

the city

sidewalks

sprinkled

with evening rain.