Getting around town

Since coming to Seattle I’ve become quite bus savvy.  I counted it up, and yesterday I rode 8 different buses in my travels.  My pockets are full of bus transfers.  I keep thinking I’ll use them in a collage, but as of yet, nothing doing.  And so I’m finally going to do it- I’m going to buy a bus pass.  I kept hoping I’d find a job that would help with bus fare, but the MoF isn’t about to start offering more benefits, and I can’t wait for something else to come up.  

Last night my final trip was to Elliot Bay, to see Laila Lalami read from her new book Secret Son.  It’s nice to go to a place and see a face I know from school, even if she skipped a bit before remembering my name.  Still, it isn’t really surprising- I never had the chance to take a class with Laila and when I met her during the interview/hiring process she was jet-lagged from Morocco.  She read wonderfully, and I realized when Rick introduced her that everyone at UCR has been pronouncing her last name incorrectly.  Instead of Lay-LA-ma, it’s closer to LA-la-mi.  I wish I’d known earlier. 

Today, though, I don’t plan on taking a single bus.  My weekends are weekdays, and I want to sit and curl up today- drinking coffee, writing a bit, reading Laila’s new book, letting sporadic Seattle show clouds and sun alternatively. 

Also, I’d like to welcome David, officially, to Body of Climates.  While the original idea of having all the contributors post weekly hasn’t really come to fruition, I do like the expanding group that’s come together.  If anyone has ideas to improve what we’re doing, please let me know.

What the Space Contains

Seattle is full of changes.  I woke up early this morning and took a bus out to Bellvue.  It was grey, but dry, when I left.  Glancing out of the window during my interview the skies were pouring buckets.  By the time I was finished only residual water blew around in the gusty air.  As I waited at the bus stop it began to hail.  When I got into the U District it was sunny and scrubbed clean.

I like that Seattle seems a place of fresh starts.  The rain comes and the winds blow and everything is washed clean.  Crossing over the lake today I watched the water; one side relatively calm, the other choppy and white-tipped waves.  There is probably a very good and sound scientific reason for this, something about the bridge and the air currents, but it seems fitting even without knowing how the disparity is caused.  Of course one side is violent, the other barely ruffled.  This place is nothing if not bi-polar.  It makes me think of something Nicelle told me– LA is a place people go when they’ve run out of options.  LA snags them before they reach the ocean.  It’s a last-chance place; make it here or you won’t make it.  Seattle doesn’t have the desperation of LA, but for me it feels similar.  I don’t feel as destitute as I would have in LA, surrounded by opulence and poverty, shimmering neon lights and broken glass, smog and jacaranda blossoms.  And I don’t feel hopeless here, but there there is something about the edge that seems similar.  One place is close to Mexico, one is close to Canada, and both are pushed far to the West Coast.  Seattle seems the safer place by far, and I am carving my niche here, slowly.  

A friend said it usually takes him at least two years to establish himself in a city.  When I groaned and begged him to take it back he did, but it’d been said and I suspect it’s truthful.  It will take a while.  There isn’t a way to skip past this, but already I’m getting better at figuring out what bus routes get me back and I’m getting comfortable walking into places on my own.  I’d love to be sharing this place with someone, but I think it’s a good thing I’m not.  It is so easy to triangulate my self-perception against those around me.  It’s one of the comments I received most about my thesis: this is a story about a narrator who isn’t actually there.  Everyone else is, but there is just a space where the body of the speaker actually resides.  An emptiness. 

I’m working on figuring out that what that space contains.  It isn’t a negative or empty place.  It’s just uncertain.  It was missing from my work because I didn’t know.  I still don’t, but I’m working on it. 

And it keeps coming.

Snow again. Snow still. Snow continuous. 

It’s supposed to come down again today, and the streets of Seattle are well packed with the white stuff.  The ever-timely buses are running late, and packed to the gills more often than not.  When the bus started to spin its wheels and it took a half hour to get up a hill, I decided to turn home. No use getting out of the house if later I’d be unable to make it back.  Simply walked the 20 blocks home. 

Snow day means I’ll be looking into journals that might make a nice home for some of my work.  I used to have a large number of submissions out in the world, but lately I’ve fallen off.  I was waiting for results to come in, and I hadn’t realized how many were already back. With that lovely Rejection letter.  I need to sort through my files and pull out Finished work, but none of it feels quite right anymore.  My new work is clunky and scattered- thoughts pulled and pasted and rather disjointed.  My old work feels like narrative from a past that I can’t remember.  Maybe Elijah has the right idea, keeping himself entirely out of his work.  As much as I told my students “fictitious narrator!” it isn’t true for me.  I lie, of course, but the heart of it is the same as my own.  I’ve started to work on poems again, but I’m almost afraid of what I’ll find there.  So I set up scaffolding, scraps of text from other people’s works and books, weaving what I have between it all.  Then the weather crashes around me, and I start to write about the light in the trees, somehow, there it is- what I didn’t want on the page staring up.   I remember Chris Abani telling us, the first class I took during grad school, “Risk everything.”  I wrote it down in my notebook, underlined it a few times.  Called my Chris as I walked home, bubbling about the danger of words and how school was going to break me open in the best way possible.  

So here I am, broken open.  Wanting to risk everything (though didn’t I do that? moving? leaving? tearing the threads that tied me to home?). Snow surrounding, muting everything.  And I was excited about this, I am excited about this- I can’t do anything but this. (Oh what cost. What danger. How I move unavoidably forward.)