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.