Movement

I hate staying in the same place. Movement. It seems to be the only thing that makes me happy. Many reasons for this:
1. I am still an infant at heart – don’t put me down, hold me close, keeping moving forward.
2. I believe Tom Petty – “you never slow down, you never grow old.”
3. I want so many things. They lie with me at night. The vibrations of a Harley; the burn of thin, cold air; Irish brogues; the Easter Islands. I tangle sweaty in my sheets unlike any other lover.
4. Happiness is just out of reach. I can feel its outline with every rotation of a plane turbine, spin of a tire, slap of sole on pavement.
5. Truth – Can’t you see it? Peaking out behind that last curve? It hides in the crook of a neck, the knee high black leather boot, or the smooth shift into 4th gear.
6. I’m Irish. If we can’t physically leave – we will get out with an impossibly embellished story or an elixir that is combination of peat bog and rainwater (a.k.a. whiskey).
7. Fear/stagnation/Fear.
Fear has a smell. I have lived with it for years. How much have I given into fear? How much have you? I fear suburbia, complacency, and the inability to even dream of something else. This occurred to me last night. I am afraid to stay in Portland. To give in. To spend five more years in this city. I feel claustrophobic. Coffee shops, pseudohippie pretention, subdued, measured hole in the walls, men with Carharts and gelled hair, women bottled into love and skinny jeans. All of these make me wake wanting to sell it all. Have nothing but a backpack. Write and travel. Use my wiles, steal tomorrow, have life beat me down. Slightly masochistic – I know.
I have never given into anything. Not that I have not acquiesced. But I have held back. I am afraid of the “fit.” What is nothing does? What if it is mediocre? What if it doesn’t gaze back at me? What if it does?
But I have to let go of “childish things.” I want more than to be that infant who sees a smattering of shiny objects. I want to fling myself – not slip. There is only so much a person can craft -that they can hold in their palms - and inhale the metallic, slick smell of being molded. I am tired. Fear takes energy and no place stays new forever. I might be missing something with this constant speed. Whittling back layers – I can see myself. Naked, pale (I will always be that), and happy. I will no longer have simply paths but rutted roads. Tattooed with age and unbridled experiences. A woman of my word, a woman who can not only slip past you in the night but who can work beside you during the day.

My summers are spent in an 8 by 6 ft shack sitting atop a conex. I miss it. I would fling open my plywood door, step out of my levis, stumble for my slumberjack sleeping bag, and let one whimpered pray loose - that the whale watching tour would be quiet on its way out of the Homer harbor. You have little other desires after cleaning dishes untill midnight. I smelled of bleach, alba body butter, sweat, and steamed king crab. I am rarely happier. It is only a gravel lot on the back end of the tourist trapped Homer spit that I call part-time home. This small slender slash of land unfurling like a black bears tounge into perfect hypothermic water. Things seem raw. Emerging, submerging - depending on the tide. I have been knee deep in the spit fishing hole in September straining to collect sea urchins for a friend's wedding - green, black that gives way to orchid, and white. My feet shod in hybiscus patterned flipflops. A pale, heedless child balanced on muck covered rocks -knowing any second could be her last dry one.
That is how it is. The spit should dissapear - driven into a winter storm. Sucked to the bottom at the next earthquake. You stand in the middle of the two lane asphalt covered road at one am. on solstice and you can see ocean rolling around you. I have emergency plans for the next time a jolt or tremor doesn't stop. They involve a boat, a rouge Irish captain, him saving me, and then me saving him. The rest is censored.
But we stay - on this fragile platform in the sea. We all stand on the edge of a quaint but inadequate show and Grewingk glacier screams from the other side of the bay. We stand on the edge. The glass may be dark but the bits of light we can see - who can turn away? I have never stood anywhere else where I felt I could walk over the waters and into Zion.